


Eighth Avenue

by Guede



Category: Aerosmith (Band), Rock Music RPF, Steven Tyler (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Crack Treated Seriously, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Multiple, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Eighties, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:41:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22552690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: They’re eating each other alive.
Relationships: Joe Perry/Steven Tyler
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Eighth Avenue

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the 1980s (vaguely in the same line as a Tanith Lee-style alternate world). Do not expect a high degree of historical accuracy.

_Joe_

Steven crawls into bed soaking wet and sneezing, with as much cigarette smoke slicking his skin as mud. He doesn’t react to Joe’s elbow, or to the knee Joe applies to his hip, and when Joe finally turns on the lights, he has long watery-pink stains on his left sleeve. More stains dribble across the sheets where he’s crawled, closer to red.

Tom and Brad have both moved out, but Joey still crashes down in the front room most nights and he’s there for Joe to kick off the couch so he can help drag Steven into the kitchen, then make calls while Joe tries to get Steven’s shirt off. The cloth is so wet that it feels like Joe’s skinning the man. Steven shivers a few times, muttering angrily at Joe, and buries his head in Joe’s shoulder. His face is like ice, down to the ragged puffs coming out of his nose, and doesn’t warm up by the time the doctor comes round.

It’s not too bad. Couple cuts on the arm that need stitching, another on Steven’s leg he forgot about till Joey grabbed it, trying to lift Steven up onto the kitchen table. Once Joey gets over being kicked into the stove, the doctor cleans it out while Steven says something about fucking up and fucking over and five grams instead of two. Joey looks at Joe over Steven’s restless twisting and Joe shrugs, flicks his fingers at Joey’s chest where last week Joey ended a bar brawl by falling into a coatrack. He ignores Joey’s mouthed retort.

They have to scrape around the place to get enough money to pay the doctor, and that’s with the credit they get courtesy of their super liking them and their super being friends of friends. Joe’s scrubbing the rest of the mud off Steven when Steven jerks around and mentions the pocket in his coat.

When Steven had crawled in he hadn’t been wearing a coat. Joe is cleaning off the man because there’s one bed and it’s already got to have the sheets pulled off it for being bloody, and he just wants to get that done and find something else to throw over the mattress, and go back to bed. But Steven snaps at him, which Joe doesn’t care about, and then tries to go back out, which Joe does care about. He doesn’t much like that sometimes, now, for example, but he does, so he goes and checks the hall and the stairwell and finds Steven’s coat wrung up around the railing. He unwrings it and brings it back, and in the left pocket there’s a wad of bills as thick as his thumb slowly dissolving together, and on the table Steven is starting to wheeze again.

Joey’s not happy about sharing the front room with filthy sheets and what’s left of Steven’s clothes, but he puts up with it. Joe finds some towels and spreads them over the mattress, and then rolls himself and Steven up under some coats. Steven is warmer, and he kisses Joe on the cheek as Joe pushes the pillows around under their heads. Joe’s not ready to fall asleep yet, so he props himself up on his arm for a cigarette and Steven curls in under his chin, kisses his shoulder. When Joe calls him an irritating son of a bitch Steven laughs weakly, then shifts so he can warm his hands on Joe’s hip. Joe has to move his arm to keep clear of Steven’s bandages.

* * *

They split up for a while, for stupid reasons, but they kept an eye on each other. It’s a small city. Sure, eight million people, but you want this and that, then you have to know so and so who knows so and so, and everybody’s so and so knows that motherfucker, so they kept an eye out so they knew when the other was coming or going. Nobody wanted to meet up by accident. That was the idea, at least.

Joe has a lot of pride, and a shitty attitude, and also, a long-fuse approach to grudges that he’s not used to cutting short. He’s not stupid or delusional, even back when he was taking more than his cigarettes, and he’d already had the feeling that a couple things weren’t right in his life when the world turned upside-down. But it would’ve been hard to come around to that by himself. He’ll say that now, looking back. He hadn’t wanted to look at it, even without all the reasons he’d had then to not look at it.

He was deep enough in the hole with certain people to have to go out when he was too fucked up, and too fucked up for anybody to stop him going out and doing whatever he’d done to get himself tossed into an institution. Well, they put him in jail first, in his own cell since he could ride on fame enough for that, but his stash ran out and he didn’t have anybody to trade with for more and he went into fits, and then they sent him on, where he went back into solitary. That was where he got lucky, Joe guessed, since they didn’t want to touch him till he’d calmed down and just strapped him down and fed and watered and handled him from a distance. He’d been too out of it, worst fucking time of his life even if half of his memory of it wasn’t there, to care. He hadn’t even known where he was, and when Steven showed up Joe hadn’t believed he was real.

For that matter, it took a long time for Joe to figure out that Steven hadn’t come in to visit, but it’s one of the few things Steven won’t talk about. That, his family, and exactly where he was when it had all started. Joey and Tom were there when they’d institutionalized Steven—Joey even got stuck for a couple days with Steven, but he’d been good and they had left him when they’d taken Steven—but afterwards they were busy trying to get him out. They’d all been at each other’s throats too, but they hadn’t done that to him, and weren’t going to let anybody else do it either. But they got distracted.

The whole world had gotten distracted for about two weeks. A lot of panic, and people being fools and people being terrible to each other, and then they had all settled down and figured out the rules. The dead came back, only if the head was gone they died again and stayed the fuck dead. It wasn’t that hard and it wasn’t that bad, once you got used to it. Maybe more people went to church for a while, but it didn’t make the dead go away and it didn’t make life any better. Easier to just buy a gun and some shells, and get back to sinning like usual.

But those first two weeks had been bad, especially in places like where Joe and Steven had been. Nobody official gave a shit and there were dead bodies right in the building, and it was hard to get out and nobody was going to try and get in.

But Steven was already in, and he’d known Joe was in there. Joe hadn’t known about him, since he’d just been watching out for where Steven wasn’t, and then he’d been too fucked up to pay attention to even that. He’d still been pretty fucked up when Steven had found him, though he’d gotten calm enough for them to just lock his door. Once Steven got through that, they could get out, and right outside Brad had been waiting for Joe, and Tom and Joey for Steven, and they’d all decided they could just put off the split for a while. That was the hard part. It was easy to look at it after that and see they just weren’t going to split again.

* * *

Steven rarely sleeps the night through, and Joe has a lot of nightmares. Usually one wakes up the other, which is why they don’t sleep well together, but Joe hasn’t even managed to doze off when Steven jerks against him.

“The hell were you doing?” Joe asks. He leans his head against the wall and stares at the cracking wallpaper opposite. “I thought we were off.”

“Well, I look like I’m kiting?” Steven mutters, digging his chin into Joe’s chest. His head tips back and shows wide eyes, wide pupils, but they’re not blown. Just fucking annoying.

Joe looks at the dresser, where he has three cigarettes left. They’ve got money for more now, which is a change from when he tried to go to bed a few hours earlier, but he’s not going out for more until morning. He weighs it in his head and then reaches over for one, because he’s being an asshole. Going on four months now and he hasn’t seen Steven slip once. “I thought we were off work.”

“Oh, that.” Steven shrugs and lets himself slide down Joe’s side. The coats shift and he pulls at them, blocking a sneeze with the crook of his wrist. His voice sounds rough, even with fatigue and whatever the hell he was doing taken into account, and they’ve got a gig on the weekend. He looks up sharply when Joe gets off the bed. “It wasn’t _work_. It was just a favor for Ray. He caught me heading up Eighth in that fucking shitstorm and gave me a ride.”

“Ray?” Then Joe shakes his head and pulls out his last clean shirt. It’s also his last nice one and he usually saves it for shows, or whatever they can get to call a show, but Steven sneezes again and he grits his teeth and goes back to make Steven put it on. “The fuck does Tabano want? Every time he shows up he asks you for something and then it ends up fucking up our shit.”

It hurts when Steven puts his arm into the sleeve, but his hissing just shaves a sharper edge on his words. “Hey, if he didn’t come round we wouldn’t eat half the month. You’re just fucking jealous he’s going out with me and you aren’t.”

Joe tosses himself on the bed and lets his head thump back against the wall. He gets that cigarette he’d been reaching for and lights it and stares at the wallpaper till Steven bumps his hip. Then he looks down, and Steven drags himself plus the coats up against Joe’s side. He catches Joe with his arm bent loose and slides a hand around it before Joe can move, pulling it into his belly. He hasn’t buttoned Joe’s shirt and Joe’s fingers push past that to his skin without even trying. Joe lets them lie limp, but Steven is pushy when he wants something, and right now he wants them to lean up against each other, his head on Joe’s shoulder and Joe’s leg moving by itself to make room for his feet.

“Anyway,” Steven says after a while, his fingers nervous and tugging at Joe’s shirt, the one on him. “He’s off to Connecticut next week. They’re running another purge and he’s got a haul down to it.”

“Good for him,” Joe mutters, but he lets his last drag out in a slow, relaxed breath. When Steven moves, cocking his head, Joe turns his hand over and puts his palm against the other man’s stomach. “You sound like shit. If you get pneumonia before Saturday we’ll take turns breaking your legs.”

Steven kisses the side of his mouth, because Joe _is_ fucking jealous Tabano takes Steven out on shooting jaunts and Joe doesn’t go on those. Joe will shoot the dead if they come after him, and no matter how lousy the roof over their heads, he has a revolver on the dresser with his cigarettes and a rifle next to his guitar case—he’ll stay clean if only so he doesn’t get so stupid as to pawn _those_ —but he doesn’t go looking for them. Even though it pays well, especially if you don’t mind hearing the damn things moaning, or have a knack for finding them when they aren’t moaning.

Tabano doesn’t mind. It’s hard to tell most of the time whether Steven does, but Steven does know how to find them even when they’re quiet. If Steven had changed his mind about being a musician he could’ve made a good living out of it. But he hasn’t, even if he still hangs out with stone-cold assholes like Tabano who get their kicks out of that kind of shit, and so he kisses the side of Joe’s mouth and Joe turns his head and kisses Steven full on his, and then wraps his arm around Steven and pulls them down to the bed. Not to fuck, just to lie there, and Steven kisses the side of Joe’s mouth because he agrees.

They don’t sleep well together, but neither of them sleep at all on their own. Steven will stay up for three days straight and drive everyone around the bend until Joe shows, and Joe will lie on his back and open and close his hands till they ache like they’d been clamped around his guitar. He sometimes thinks about going out there, joining the hunts, but so far Steven’s come back before he ever does.

* * *

Steven was in the asylum for two weeks more than Joe and he always had a mouth on him, even when he was so high his eyes were rolling back in his head. So it was anyone’s guess exactly what they did, but when he got Joe out he had raw patches on his arms and legs and chest from straps, and little round scorch marks here and there, and needle scars like they’d used ones the size of harpoons. But he’d moved and talked like Steven, more like Steven than he had for a long time, like the Steven Joe had met back at the beginning. And he’d had a gun with some bullets left, and knives from the kitchen, and he’d said he knew how to kill the fucking things Joe had been staring at through the bars on his window. So Joe had gone with him.

Joe had killed his first three dead by the time they got through the last gate. He’d been shaking but Steven hadn’t noticed till Joe had dropped one of the knives. Then he’d circled back and picked it up, and to this day he hasn’t brought that up. And of course they still fight, even if it’s nowhere like it was before, like they honestly wanted to kill each other, and when they fight Steven brings up most things. But not that.

* * *

In the morning Steven’s up first for breakfast, using Joey’s knife and making Brad brew the coffee, and with a sheet of paper wasted on rejected lyrics in front of him. He’s talking to Joey about their practice the other day and their session later tonight, and barely turns when Joe pulls up the chair next to him. Joe props his guitar against the leg of Steven’s hanging down from the chair and picks at the meager remains on Steven’s plate.

Joey glares at him, but he and Joe both know Steven’s already done with it. Then he hands Steven coffee, and Brad passes another cup to Joe. The brew’s stronger than it has been in two weeks, with enough grounds in it to keep Joe from seeing the bottom of the cup.

“Coffee guy was up early today, lucky for us, and Tom went out for meat,” Brad says. He grimaces when Steven looks up, curious. “Right. Day after you left, Cabozzi’s butcher cousin decided to relocate. We asked but nobody’s saying anything. But there’s some new guy selling off Fulton and Tom’s going to check him out.”

Sometimes Steven gets territorial about the extra cash his jaunts with Tabano bring in, and then they’ll be fighting over the last egg while he’ll have a brand-new mother of pearl mouth-harp in his pocket or something like that. But today he just nods and goes back to scribbling on his paper. “I think we should switch that chorus around,” he says to Joe. “Also, me and Joey were talking about the lead-in.”

“Yeah?” Joe spears up some greasy gray meat with his knife, and then tries to drown the taste in the coffee. “Listen, Steven, I was talking to some people and they’re saying maybe we should—”

“Is it about the gig?” Steven says, pulling up sharp at the end. He stares at the paper, his eyes narrowed. The pen ticks back and forth in his fingers. Then he leans over and props his head up on his other hand so the end of the pen’s threatening to take off the end of his nose.

He’s going to argue and it’s early and they owe him and last night he was bleeding over the goddamn table they’re eating at now. Joe puts his knife down, careful, and then presses his hand against the side of his head. He catches Brad looking at him and raises his brows.

Brad doesn’t like arguing either. Brad takes a look at Steven and then sits down opposite them. “Look, while you were out Max’s owner got shot, and then a couple other people got shot.”

“I _know_ ,” Steven says witheringly, shaking his head at them. He writes down two words, then crosses one out. After some thought, he crosses out the other. He moves his leg, flinches, and then reaches down and swings up Joe’s guitar and has it out on the table before Joe can even look over, like he’s putting down eggshells. “I heard the radio, like everybody else, Bradley. _‘Good people of New York, may I please remind you that for the common welfare of all, we must bridge our differences and accept our responsibilities. So whatever the motherfucker was doing, screwing your wife, kicking your dog, please just remember to shoot him in the fucking head.’_ ”

He does do a good impression, and they’re a bunch of struggling musicians kicking around between the living dead and the criminal underworld. Joey sniggers and Steven smiles at him, pleased as hell with himself. Then he catches Brad and Joe looking at each other again and sighs.

“Yeah, well, so we don’t know if the gig’s on,” Brad says.

“So I can catch pneumonia now?” Steven says back. He makes his eyes big and round, and keeps them on Brad who wouldn’t have any fucking idea, while he drinks his coffee.

Joe reaches out and flicks at his guitar strings. “Gary said our old place is open again, if we want it.”

“Gary’s a doll.” Steven drinks more coffee. “Really. I love him like he’s another brother. But we go back to Boston now and we’ll never be more than a regional act ever again, and you know it.”

“We get shot because some gangsters we don’t know are mad at other gangsters we don’t know and we’re not going to make it either,” Joe says. He flicks another string, then presses his fingers over it to make it stop. He’d rather keep on flicking, hell, pull the guitar over and really play it, but he can see the way the muscles are working in Steven’s throat, like something’s trying to crawl up it. “Fuck it, Steven, there are fucking _dead people_ crawling around, remember? You want to talk regional versus national fucking act now?”

“Just think of it as down-home week,” Joey tries. “It’s a visit, Steven. Till shit calms down. I mean, shit, the way you looked like last night, it’s not like you’re going to be up for much for at least a few days.”

Steven tries to get up, and Joe grabs his arm and yanks him back down. It’s his injured arm and Steven goes white and drops his pen, and Joey lunges over to slap off Joe’s hand, and Steven slaps both of them with his paper. Joe barely feels it, but it makes a loud enough noise and everybody is quiet after that.

Eventually Steven shifts himself up. He pokes at the bandage on his arm, mumbles under his breath, and then puts the arm up on the table so he can use his wrist to smooth out his paper. “I got a piano,” he says. He doesn’t look at them. “Before I got home. It’s getting delivered in an hour.”

“You what?” Brad stutters.

“Oh, yeah. You got one.” Joey gets it quicker and is already dropping his head in his hands. “White baby grand? No, don’t tell me, you fucking—oh, Jesus, Steven.”

Brad tries for another minute, but in the end he just gets up and goes out to the front room. He’ll be fine, but he missed most of the bad parts with Joe and with Steven, so sometimes he acts like any normal person would act. Joey lasts a little longer, till he’s breathed in and out and made sure Steven’s seen his irritation and knows Joey’s forgiven him anyway, and then he goes out to talk to Brad.

“You were out two and a half days,” Joe finally says. “What the hell was it, Grand Central?”

“No, just some warehouse. Ray had some of his shit there, and some other bootlegger got a dead motherfucker in with his latest shipment, and they didn’t fucking notice till they got the crate open.” Steven wiggles his hand in between them and Joe moves over, but that makes Steven look like he thinks Joe’s angry at him and like he’s sorry Joe’s angry at him. “I got a guitar too, but I left it in Ray’s truck. He’s probably going to bring it over with the piano.” 

Joe is mad at Steven, but not like that, and he damn well wishes Steven were sorry about it, but not like that. It’s not that Joe doesn’t want to touch the infuriating son of a bitch. “A guitar? The hell kind of warehouse was this?”

“No, they’re not from there. But we didn’t get paid for the warehouse _at_ the warehouse.” Steven’s rubbing at his arm, and then under it, where he has lines of bruising like he fell into a grate. “We got paid once Ray got his shit out and to his buyer. Or we would’ve, if the buyer had been alive, but he wasn’t, and he still had his fucking head because yes, I _know_ the wonderful owners of our venues are having fucking business disputes with each other. So fuck it, I was getting _something_ out of it.”

And if Tabano was doing a delivery he’d take his truck, and he was always happy to encourage Steven’s lifting habits. “I thought you said he was going to Connecticut.”

“Right after he gives me my piano and your guitar,” Steven shoots back. He looks Joe up and down and then twists himself a little, just till his head lands on Joe’s shoulder. “I stuck with him on a second fucking delivery when he said one and the second one got messy too, so that fucker better bring them over. I earned them.”

“I’m going to open the door and break his jaw, and then let him in and let Joey finish him off,” Joe says. He puts his arm back over the top of the chair and sighs, and then pulls it down to Steven’s shoulders. “And you wonder why we don’t want him around. Steven, you asshole. I didn’t even ask for anything.”

Steven draws in a breath like he’s going to disagree, and loudly, and then he holds it for a while. “I fucking asked for a chance the last time I was in this city,” he says very quietly. Quiet and low and distant, like he’s talking to Joe from way out on the water. “Didn’t get it. Fine, you have to earn it. Well, so I earned it this time, with goddamn _zombies_ of all things, and I’m staying till I get it. Go toss the guitar out the window if you want.”

“I didn’t say that, Steven. I said—” Joe stops for a moment. “A piano in the front room’s not going to make this Boston, you know?”

“I had a piano here too,” Steven shrugs. He puts his hand on the table and fingers invisible keys. “When I was growing up. I even had a piano in there. I mean, there was one. Never got around to playing it, but I saw it when they were wheeling me around.”

Joe stops again. He doesn’t like talking about that. He doesn’t really remember anything about it except for the last day or so, but he doesn’t even want to try and remember so he doesn’t like talking about it, just in case that does it. And Steven’s an asshole, but do unto others, or at least try to, so he doesn’t usually ask Steven either. If Steven wants you to know something he’ll tell you, anyway.

“I earned it walking out of there,” Steven adds. He laughs shortly. “Made it official. You’re fucking crazy to stay.”

“Yeah, I know,” Joe finally says. He puts his jaw against the top of Steven’s head.

Steven plays a couple more table-top chords, then folds his hand around the table edge and pulls himself up. He reaches for his pen again, and then for the paper. “I really wanted to play that piano,” he says, tilting his head. He writes out a whole line and leaves it, though he crosses out the one he writes under it. “I swear to God, it was a fucking Steinway. I’d like to know how the hell a place like that got one of those.”

“Is this one a Steinway?” Joe asks.

He doesn’t know anything about pianos, except how to finger a couple chords, courtesy of the year of lessons his parents forced on him, and Steven knows that. “The guitar’s a Gibson,” he answers, turning his head and grinning at Joe. He pecks at the grimace Joe gives him and then shifts up under Joe’s arm, going back to his lyrics. “You miss some good shit, not coming out.”

“Maybe, but the better shit is what makes it back. Looks smarter to sit and wait for it, you know?” Joe knows Steven is surprised before Steven even turns, and in all honesty that’s what gets him upset these days. The other shit, like Tabano, like Steven’s light-fingered moments of idiocy, they’re just different ways for Steven to get to the same point and then miss it.

But when Steven turns to him, he slides his hand into Steven’s hair and holds him still and kisses him too hard instead of yelling at him. Steven winces and Joe knows he should ease up, but he doesn’t, and Steven’s never going to make him. 

* * *

They’d walked into a fight once they’d walked out of that crazy house. Tom and Joey had been furious with Steven about something, even though they’d pulled him and Joe into the car like letting go would make them disappear. And Tom had been barely civil to Joe once they were all in the car, leaving Brad and then, after some warming up, Joey to fill in things for Joe.

It took a long time for Joe get Tom on his own about it. At first the problem was mostly on Tom’s side, even after Joe and Tom’s wife had talked out their rift, but Tom eventually saw what the rest of them saw and understood that they’d have to deal with it. Then the problem was getting away from Steven, who had trailed Joe as if they were Siamese twins since breaking them out. Joe had thought he’d understood that, and had thought he was entitled to complain about it.

Tom had thought that that was hilarious. “He made us wait,” he finally told Joe. “You know that, right? We were going to get him out, but he told us he had to go get you.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to let anyone else get you,” Steven had told him. Two minutes later, because they were all broke again, barely able to clear legal fees for Steven’s and Joe’s official discharge once law and order had been restored, and sharing two fleabait rooms in Alphabet City, and so all Joe had had to do was walk to the door between and yell at Steven. “Fuck you, asshole, I still don’t know if I’m happy to see you again, but you’re not going before I go.”

“So the same old thing,” Joe had said, half-laughing, half-snarling. He’d been edgy from talking with Tom, and angry with Steven for some other thing, and it’d still been confusing enough in general so that they still hadn’t known if they’d be able to do anything but crowd in together and get on each other’s nerves. “Figures.”

Steven had cocked his head and made Joe look at him again. There were things that were different, things that weren’t going away, but Joe hadn’t wanted to deal with those yet so he’d been ignoring them. It was hard enough dealing with the old things between them all. But Steven had cocked his head and Joe had paused, and then Steven had turned and taken two steps forward and kissed Joe. Hand hard on the back of Joe’s head, and then his nails raking through Joe’s hair as he took another step past, breaking them up.

“You’re an asshole, Joe,” Steven had said, matter-of-fact and not upset at all. “But even an asshole like you’s better than letting those things get you.”

* * *

Tom comes back with some big, beautiful steaks, and even though Joe’s already eaten he has to tell himself not to grab them away and tear into them raw. He leans against the jamb and watches Tom stack them in the back of the fridge.

Steven’s gone back to bed. He’d let Joe kiss him bloody, till Joey had come back and appointed himself Steven’s nurse and torn Joe a new one over it, and then he’d wanted to argue arrangements some more. But Joe had managed not to play that one and Joey had backed him up, and between them they’d shoved Steven out of the kitchen. Once Steven hit the bed he’d gone out, and so hard he looked like he could sleep till whatever passes for Judgment Day now.

But Steven’s tricky even when he’s flat-out, so Joey’s gone down to tell the nosy-friendly tenants on the first floor, where the fire escape drops out, to let them know if they see Steven monkeying down that way, and Joe’s fiddling with his guitar. He’d rather be back in the bedroom sitting on Steven’s head, but he and Tom need to talk about how they’re not leaving town, so instead he’s making sure Steven knows he’s still around. “He’s waiting for a piano.”

“Well, Jesus, I guess that settles it,” Tom says. He pulls his hands out of the fridge and turns them over so the dribble of blood rolls between his knuckles. Then he shuts the fridge and goes to run his hands under the tap. “We’re all going to get shot up for a piano.”

“Did you really think he was going to go?” Joe catches a nail on a string, nearly rips it off when he notices. He winces and glances it over, then shifts the guitar under his arm and picks his nail till it’s smooth.

Tom wipes his hands on a rag. It looks familiar, and Joe realizes what Joey’s done with Steven’s suit. Some of it, anyway. “Of course not. And don’t yell about I made you talk to him anyway. You fucking wanted to.”

Joe hears something behind him and feels the muscles running across his shoulders pull up. His hand slides on the guitar neck, down to where the stiletto is taped to the back, and then slides back as he pulls the guitar back in front of him. “We weren’t even under fucking contract. We haven’t even gotten fucking paid.”

“And I am sure that they’re going to understand that distinction. Hell, maybe they’ll even let us straighten it out with their accountant,” Tom mutters. He drops the rag, picks up the other package he brought with him. “Jesus. We weren’t going. We all knew that, but you would think you could talk him into not riding shotgun into the shit.”

“ _You_ talk to him,” Joe snaps, clawing his nails over the guitar. He cuts the tip off another one, close enough to the quick to bleed. “Fuck. Last time I talked to him he left.”

Tom looks at him and Joe hates that, hates remembering that Tom knows how to read him that well. It wasn’t just Steven he’d walked out on.

He looks at his bleeding finger and Tom sighs and unwraps the package. “He got you something again, didn’t he? Joey was saying something,” Tom says.

“A Gibson. Maybe.” Finally Joe sticks his finger in his mouth. It tastes wet and salty, and after he takes it out he spits into the sink. “I don’t know if Steven fucking knows when he’s out doing that shit. He might as well be back on the dragon.”

“A Gibson,” Tom echoes. He thinks it’s funny, because he knows better than to think Steven didn’t get a real one. And because he’s not quite the one, and sometimes Joe knows he looks over and thinks what if, and because he knows what if is stupid even if he wonders it sometimes. He walked Steven across the country right before this all happened, when Joe wasn’t around, and if what-if had ever been going to stop whiffing, it would’ve been then and it hadn’t. Tom thinks about it but he does think, and that’s why it hadn’t.

Joe shrugs, still angry, and looks over his guitar at the dark shining metal sitting on the brown paper. He pauses, then looks up at Tom.

“This new meat man,” Tom says. Sober now, touching the gun like he thought it’d dart away on him. They were all better than they’d been, more careful, but they still aren’t thinking about making a career out of it. “It’s Dufay, Joe. He and Zunk and Gary all said it’d be good to pick up some while the market’s still flush. I’m thinking you get told the same thing by three different people, you should listen.”

There are knives in places Joe’s half-forgotten at this point, so they have to watch where they stick their hands. And the rifle under the bed, and the revolver Joe really wishes he had a proper holster for, what with the safety lever being wobbly and all, and then Steven has his shotgun and two rifles, put back in the closet exactly where they always are because he might crawl in half-dead but he needs his things where they’re supposed to be. And that’s a machine gun on the table.

“I got one for Terry too, and Brad said he’d take the other one.” Tom nudges the gun so it rolls over onto the other side. “Joey’s got his own deal going.”

Joe exhales and wants a cigarette, and then realizes he’s left them with Steven so of course they’re gone by now. “What, are we _joining_ the party, here?”

“Well, are we?” Tom asks, and he’s not talking to Joe.

* * *

After getting that kiss out Steven had stopped following Joe around so much. It wasn’t because he was embarrassed, or afraid of anyone’s reaction, or even gave a shit about what anyone else thought about it, including Joe. He didn’t act like that. He acted like he’d finally made a point and everybody had agreed with him that it was a point, and like it hadn’t all made them even more nervy than they’d been with people coming back from the dead and martial law and all kinds of other fire raining down on their heads.

None of them, except maybe Joey, were saints about it. Nobody was getting thrown out but there were plenty of stupid jokes and some even stupider fights that weren’t really about what was actually said, and Joe knew he’d gone out a few times for no good reason except to get away and been lucky to get back alive. 

Joey had talked to Steven about it. He’d tried to be private about it but Steven didn’t care and they were all stuck together eavesdropping on each other anyway. He’d thought about it, he’d said, and considering people were rising from the dead and all, it looked like the only way to think about the world was to just take what you saw and heard and knew yourself. So he knew Steven, or at least had known everything up to Steven laying one on Joe, so he just wanted to know if he hadn’t really known, after all.

No, Steven had said. No, he’d known as much as Steven had known, right up to the institutionalization and involuntary sobriety and the living dead showing up. Then Steven had had some time and a clear mind and a real good reason to use it and use it right then and there, and he’d done some thinking. And if they didn’t like it, then fuck them, because it was a brand new world and he’d just found out Ray had made it and the two of them were going out for a good long look at the way things were now.

It’d been all of two days since Steven had done it and Joe had thought those were the longest days of his life. Then Tabano had come round, right as Joey was trying to get Steven to talk sense, and hadn’t brought Steven back for another two days. And when he did, Steven had a thousand dollars in bounties and someone else’s bloody clothes on his back and half of a new song scribbled down. He’d sat on the floor and finished the song while Tom and Joey yelled at him, and when they’d gotten to whether or not he’d been taking anything he’d asked why that mattered.

Because he’d been fucking useless before with the drugs and that was before they had all the shit they had to deal with now, and they just couldn’t deal with that and him so please fucking tell them they weren’t dealing with him again.

Well, no, he hadn’t, Steven had said, and he hadn’t since he’d gotten fucking put in.

So that little event with Joe hadn’t just been some drug talking, Tom had said.

No, that wasn’t, and is that what they gave a shit about?

No, Tom had spat out, and then they’d all looked at each other and been surprised, because none of them disagreed and they’d damn well known somebody was going to. Should. Would have. They were all agreeing that they were mad they’d all been wrong about that. 

So why’d he go out, Brad had asked. And Steven had sat there and tucked his limbs around himself, not protective, just neat, like he was setting them in their places. He’d looked at his song for a while, sung a little under his breath. It’d made Joe’s fingers twitch and he remembered pressing his hands against his legs because it’d been that long since they’d wanted to dance like that, he’d forgotten he wanted them to. Forgotten that they had that kind of link between them, could do that to each other. Would even want to.

Well, Steven finally had said, nobody had told him not to.

* * *

Steven’s still in the bedroom where Joe left him, for once. He rolls over and smirks up at Joe, blowing rings off of Joe’s last cigarette. “Well, hello, beautiful.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Joe says, sitting down. He has to pull in his guitar to keep Steven from scorching it as Steven leans over to stub out the cigarette. “Tabano’s not here yet.”

“Said he might be late. Had another run to make after he dropped me off,” Steven mumbles, curling up to Joe’s hip. He’s favoring his arm, tucking it into his side and wriggling around on the point of his shoulder. “Still going to show, Joe.”

Joe drums his fingers on the edge of the guitar and Steven hits his elbow because he’s not keeping time. He wasn’t trying and he lifts his hand before he remembers and puts it down. One of his fingers catches a peg and he grimaces. “Yeah, he usually does.”

Steven’s quiet for once. Maybe it’s his arm and leg, even though being hurt generally makes him even more talkative, since they’ve all got to know how he’s doing as they’re hardboiled bastards who don’t ask and he’s got nothing else to do and he’s got no fucking drugs these days to use to make the pain go away. But when Joe looks down past the guitar Steven’s eyes are open. Not squeezed shut, not splayed wide, just open. Contemplating something past Joe’s leg, no particular feeling about it up front but he’s considering it.

“Did you know Dufay was around?” Joe finally says. He hates the way his voice rises, too high for itself. Something he learned on his own, where he falls and will always fall on the singing scale, and all the vengeful dreams in the world aren’t going to change that.

They were stupid dreams anyway, not even about revenge, about stealing Steven’s superstar frontman shit, so much as wishing he wasn’t who he was. He’s never really been that type. He just got that low a couple times, and he hates remembering that.

“He came up with half the fee for my first lawyer.” Steven shifts his head out from under Joe’s guitar. He’s still got Joe’s last good shirt on and the loose cuffs flap like bird wings as he works himself upright. “He’s mostly in your face because I told him you always locked yourself in your room. I did that to him once and he snapped the door in half.”

“I’m impressed,” Joe says, picking at his guitar. He shakes his head, then scratches the hair out of his face. The barbershops are open again but everyone’s grown out their hair lately, looking like wildmen on the edge of civilization, which is what they are. Anyway, no reason to spend a dime on a fancy haircut when you can drop it on a bullet, and the morning shave is just an excuse to have another blade handy. “Look, what the hell are we supposed to do? Go out in a blaze of glory? You put that in a fucking song, Steven. You don’t play around with it.”

Steven sighs and Joe ignores him, so Steven puts his face in Joe’s and sighs in it. When Joe looks up Steven shoves his hand into Joe’s hair, pinning it back. His nail sticks Joe’s ear like a needle. “Yeah, I knew he was around,” Steven says. He leans in and kisses Joe when Joe’s trying to talk to him, and Joe knows he’s caught the part he opened up in the kitchen when Steven laughs. When Steven sits back he licks the blood off his mouth. “Joe, you and everybody else, you’ve been outside how many times in the last month? Do you really think we can get to Boston? Do you think we can even get out of Manhattan? It’s a fucking _island_.”

“So—” The guitar slips off Joe’s leg. He feels the slick wood against his arm and then it’s off, slithering across the sheets like it’s grown a mind like Steven’s.

“So you think you’re going to roll up to one of the tolls and get passed on through, well.” Steven laughs again and crawls on Joe. He burrows his head and hands into Joe’s neck and sides, runs his thigh up between Joe’s legs, twists like sin when Joe drags off his own damn shirt from the man’s shoulders. “You fucking idiot. We’re stuck, all right, and at least I’m going to do something about it.”

“You think you’re the only one,” Joe snaps, and then turns them over and presses his mouth down over Steven’s, teeth first.

* * *

Nobody was going to reason with Steven when he was like that. Sober and thinking, talking, cajoling and threatening, and then the thousand dollars. The fucking dead backing them all into the corner and him walking in and out like he could still do whatever he wanted. Like he knew what was going on. Joe only wanted to ask him for the money, and only because he hadn’t had a damn thing except watery coffee since Steven had gone out. Coffee had been all they’d had left. He hadn’t starved himself waiting up for Steven.

Steven had given up on them and their questions and taken his song out into the hall, into the stairwell, tapping out the rhythm on the railing. Joe caught him on a landing and Steven asked what he thought about it, and Joe told him he hadn’t written a single fucking good thing since they’d split. It hadn’t been what Joe had wanted to say, even if it was what Joe thought.

The stairwell was dark. That shithole of a place hadn’t been hooked up to the electric grid even before the dead had started to come back. He couldn’t see Steven’s face but he could hear the man ask so how much he wanted, like he knew a fucking thing about that. They’d gone their own ways for six years and he’d lived his own life and made his own music and dug his own fucking hole. It mattered who the hole belonged to. It did. He’d done something without Steven and the son of a bitch had come back anyway and found him and acted like he’d known all along.

If Steven had said something then, when Joe had pushed him up against that wall, Joe hadn’t heard it. He hadn’t cared to. He knew Steven was pulling at him, not pushing away, and knew he wasn’t the only one angry enough to want to get his hand down and fucking jerk at something, and when Joey, the only one stupid and worried and aware enough to go after them, blew two shotgun rounds past them at the dead thing crawling up the next flight of stairs down, he knew he wasn’t the only one with his fucking pants around his knees.

He’d like to think he would have gone after Steven, if it had been the other way around. He’d like to say at least that he doesn’t know what he would have done, he’d been so out of it. But he knew even before Steven had gone and kissed him that he’d gotten himself so far gone he hadn’t even known where Steven was, and he knew what that meant.

“I had it,” Steven had said to Joey, and had held up his knife.

Joey never dropped the shotgun. “Fuck you,” he’d said back. “Fuck you, and fuck your song and your fucking—finding this out now, goddamn it, and fucking get back inside.”

They’d gone back inside. Joey’d slammed the chain on with the tip of his gun, and then had gone and sat at the window with it across his lap. Eventually they’d all realized he was holding it to keep his hands from shaking.

Steven had shut his mouth about that too. He’d looked at Joey and then ignored Tom, and walked around them both to where he could tidy himself. Under his breath he’d been humming something and when Joe had gotten close enough he could tell it was that song.

“I wrote it for you,” he’d said, making Joe jump, and then had kept on dragging his fingers through his hair. “About you. Needs a riff.”

Everyone had been watching them. “I don’t have a guitar,” Joe had said.

Steven had turned and looked at him too, and then had held out the money. “How much do you want?”

* * *

He always thinks Steven will push more. Steven does everywhere else. And it’s not that Steven just lets him. Joey doesn’t look at Joe the same these days but he knows Steven too and he knows any blood on Steven’s mouth is there because he wants it. But Steven stops fighting after that, because he’s made his point by then, and if it takes Joe a little longer to see that, well, it’s the only time Steven doesn’t seem to mind waiting on him.

Joe’s careful by the time he gets to the arm, to the bruises, to the leg, and Steven is pressing his mouth wet and soft down Joe’s neck, humming again. He likes the sore spots, the raw ones, where Joe’s banged himself somewhere along the line and then forgotten about it, and he nurses at them till Joe half-forgets what he’s doing with his hands on Steven’s hips, his mouth muffled into the damp pillow. Then Steven climbs on him again, drags his hands down where the man likes them, pushes Joe’s head over with his chin and sucks on Joe’s lip, and Joe remembers.

Afterward one of them will stir only enough to clean their bodies with whatever is nearby. Joe this time, with his own shirt, and he pauses for a moment before pushing it back against Steven’s thigh. Steven shivers, sleepy, still interested anyway, and then retwists himself around Joe, the only time Joe’s sure that he’s not on the verge of leaving.

“Tom thinks we’re going to play gangster,” Joe says. He pushes his dirty shirt over the edge of the bed and lets it drop out of the world.

Steven nuzzles Joe’s shoulder, draws light fingers over Joe’s side. This still surprises too. They were always putting their hands on each other before, but violent, joking, friendly. When Steven wants he can give affection a sharper edge than any razor. And when he wants, these days, he can make it sweet enough to make Joe’s head ache worse than any drug he ever survived. Sometimes Joe wishes he knew that they’d never run into one of Steven’s old girlfriends. He wasn’t looking for it then, but if they do he knows he’ll look for it now.

“We’re still fucking playing at being a band.” For a moment Steven is still. Then he sighs and turns over and looks at the ceiling. “Don’t be stupid, Joe. You know we’re lucky we just had a chance to figure out what we are good at, and it ain’t the cavalry.”

“Could fool me,” Joe tells him, because even if Joe himself would rather they just lie there and ignore everything else, he can’t do it. He’s tried and something always slips, and he’s left reaching like now, putting his hand on Steven’s arm. “Well, look, if you said something once in a while instead of just going around with—”

“Nobody’s coming after a bunch of broke musicians, Perry,” Steven says, closing his eyes. His head turns towards Joe and then he grins, still blind. “Fuck. Nobody with half a brain, at least. Well, whatever Tom got, I suppose it’ll look nice over the fireplace.”

Joe wants to knock his head into Steven’s grin. Instead he exhales into the bed. “We don’t have a fireplace.”

Steven opens his eyes and pulls his mouth tight. “I know. I mean we’ll have to move.” He jerks his head. “No, not to Boston, you thick son of a bitch. But out of here. Here, we’re not fucking broke musicians. We’re fucking assholes with lots of fucking guns.”

“Your fucking piano,” Joe finally says.

“I told Ray to bring it here,” Steven tells him. “Didn’t say fucking bring it up.”

And then he laughs again, and Joe wants to tell him it’s a stupid idea, he’s a motherfucking fool, they’re all fucked because of him. To stop laughing. To at least—at least make it look like Joe could follow him. Because Joe hasn’t, not since Steven dragged him out, and he’s never wanted to follow the man. He’s never followed anyone, not him, not his way, but he’s been lost since then and now he’s not but he still just wants to fucking _find_ something. Just once.

Steven kisses him, full on the mouth, and smiles up at him like Joe isn’t looking like hell on death’s back, like Joe is smiling back the same damn way, like Joe’s as happy about this as he is. Shithole tenement, nightmares too common to make the back papers, starving just to hold together what’s left of his dreams and he knows, every time, he knows he didn’t find this either. Not this time. 

* * *

_Joey_

Steven’s been holding back again. He’s always holding back, the selfish son of a bitch, and all the electroshock straitjacket whatever other hell those sons of bitches put him through couldn’t cure him of that. These days it’s not even an irritation. It’s just what happens.

At least it’s what happens that nets them enough cash to front a down payment on an old shoebox of a saloon in the Bowery. The place has been raided one too many times to keep open, because there are still laws against a good time even with the dead pulling your ankles, and the first few nights they’re up watching the planks they’ve nailed over the holes for any grasping rotting hands. After that Steven gets his black market friends around and they make it solid enough for Joey to start thinking about which room upstairs he wants.

There are four, and together they’d make enough room for one person to breathe in. Steven’s already wedged his damn piano into one, and if Rick didn’t have, under all that crazy fucking daredevil bullshit, more of a sense of compassion than the rest of them, Joe would’ve missed him bundling a mattress under it too. But Rick brought strings for Joe’s new Gibson and pretended he’d rather shoot up the vacant wreck across the street with Tom’s new tommy gun than crack jokes with Steven, and so Joe had made Steven settle for living out of the next room over.

Tom’s gotten himself a new place down the street. Brad hasn’t gotten one and he’s between girlfriends, so he’s back with them and it’s him and Joey for the last two rooms. Or Joey could sleep downstairs, at least till they knock together the rest of the proofing and make it a studio. That’s the idea, anyway. At the end of the day, in the middle of the night, when the lights are out and the dead are crawling and you’re staring too hard at the things that keep them and you apart, you’re going to want to go somewhere else. Or at least think you are.

Just opening the saloon again is out of the question. They couldn’t afford fuck all the first few weeks after breaking out Steven and Joe—couldn’t even find it, not without getting killed, and it did turn out that they wanted to not get killed just a little more than they wanted to keep chasing dreams into smoke and needles. They’re better at not getting killed than they were back then, but it’s still a thin margin and they’re sober enough to see it. So better not try having a bar. They’re not that good and they’re never going to be that good.

Anyway, booze brings bullets and they’re not good at that either. Sometimes Joey remembers the bullshit target-shooting sessions they used to have, drugged out of their minds and skeeving bullets off every which way and never hitting a thing, and he wishes he could go back and slap himself. He hits things more often than not these days but he’s lost all his interest in bullshit.

So they’re going to knock together a studio. Since Max’s is out and nobody knows who’s gotten it, none of the other clubs can find anybody willing to play them, not without cover, and the clubs aren’t making enough to cover the register and any live acts. Records don’t make a fuss when a gunfight breaks out before intermission, and Steven has friends who have friends who’ve seen the equipment they need. The rest of them are starting to go out enough to run into other acts who are in the same boat. Anyway, they need to stop hiding and start being a band again if they’re ever going to get away from this. Anyway, they need the money.

It’s a good plan and Joey agrees with it, and sometimes he hopes it means Steven’s back because it’s Steven’s plan and Steven, before everything got so bad, was always the one who knew what they had to do to get where they wanted to go. He was an asshole about it and killed them a hundred times over for not knowing too, for catching on too slow, for not wanting to do it, but he always got them going, and in the end they always figured out they wanted to go with him.

He still misses that Steven. This one, he doesn’t have the drugs to drone them out and drain him down, and he doesn’t kill them anymore. They argue. He yells. But when he yells at Joey, there’s no echo from Joey’s father’s voice anymore, and then he comes around sometimes in the middle of the night. He’ll wake up when Joey’s the only other one up because even if they’ve tested everything Joey still thinks about what happens if the dead come through and nobody hears till too late, and he’ll sit there and be quiet or be loud, be across the room or be laying his head on Joey’s shoulder, whatever will pry Joey’s fingers one by one off the gun. Joey does like this one.

But this one, he holds back and it’s not always because in that fucking selfish skull of his it’s them and him. He goes in and out at night, and he never tells them when or where but he never tells them _no_ either. If they want to follow him, they could follow. But he’s not going to lead them there. He just doesn’t think about them when he goes.

* * *

Joe never cared what people saw him do with Steven, even before. The way he felt about him was how he acted, and how he acted was how he felt. It was ugly sometimes, and it could be cruel in a way Joey could never understand, like watching a cat bait a mouse, but it was honest.

When Steven had handed him the money for a guitar, right after they’d broken out of that damn madhouse, Joe had looked as if he wanted to set fire to it, right in Steven’s hand. He’d asked where he was supposed to find someone to take it.

So Steven took the money back, and took it out the next morning and got Joe a guitar. One moment he was by Joey, the two of them picking their way through the crates and slop of the nearest alley market, and then he was by Joey again, with a battered body hanging from a broken neck and a couple sawed-off walnut furniture legs. Joey got a leg, for sticks, and Joe got the body and used its broken neck to swing it to pieces against the doorway. Asking Steven what was going on, what was he doing, did he bring that fucking dead man from last night back with him? Was he going to just fucking kill them now? Was it fucking _funny_?

It took Tom and Brad to drag Joe into the other room, and through the paper walls they snapped and snarled, and then they all came back for the first real meal they’d had since they could remember. None of them knew what to do but they were tired and hungry, and at some point everything but sleeping and eating stopped mattering. They kicked the pieces of the guitar out of the way, or didn’t, and sat on them, or used them for plates. Steven curled up in the corner afterward, with the other walnut leg, and went to sleep.

Sometime in the night Joey got up and Joe was digging the last piece out of the radiator. He saw Joey was awake but didn’t care, and got the pieces all in front of him, next to Steven, and began putting them together. It took him the better part of a week and he took Joey’s walnut leg to fix the neck, so Steven had to give Joey the other one, and in that time Steven never so much as looked out the window, and Joe never said more than two words to any of them, including Steven. He always worked on it in Steven’s corner.

When he finished he didn’t say, but that was when Steven went out again and came back with another fistful of bounties and some strings, and this time Joe pulled him down in the corner and curled up around Steven and used the guitar to barricade them in there, one hand white-knuckled on the neck and the other back behind Steven, where Joey couldn’t see it. 

When Joey woke up that night Steven was still there, but sitting, guitar over his knees, stringing and tuning, and Joe was still curled around him, as if it wouldn’t take just a step to take Steven past him. Steven didn’t look over but Joe did, and then he looked away. He didn’t care that Joey saw. He just didn’t want to see when Steven got up.

* * *

The saloon has working water, and every day, the first time Joey twists a knob and hears the faucet whistle and creak, he holds his breath, and every day the water eventually comes out and he can let himself breathe again. He ends up picking his room because it’s closest to the pipes, so when the hot water comes up it’ll go to him first. What you learn, relearn, keep learning to appreciate.

Steven goes out one more time after they move in, and Joey spends half a day in the Bronx breaking into abandoned buildings for things to resell, and between them they pull up the money for the studio. Joey even meets a girl, when he’s trying not to get cheated on old mattresses for soundproofing, and they almost agree to see each other again. He knows where she comes to trade, anyway, and he doesn’t think she’s lying when she says she’ll be back next Thursday.

Brad and Tom bicker over how best to put up the mattresses, till Joe settles it by slamming one up and banging in the nails before anyone can stop him. He helps till they hear the piano drifting down the stairs and then he goes up. Later, when Brad and Tom are arguing again and Joey needs someone to just tell them who’s wrong, he goes up and he catches them under the piano.

Joe on his back, with the new guitar within arm’s length and sheets of paper scattered around, so maybe they were trying to work. Steven winds over Joe’s right side with his head hanging over Joe’s shoulder, his eyes closed, maybe asleep. It’s more likely during the daytime than at night. He doesn’t move when Joey comes over and gets down on his knees and sticks his head under far enough to see Joe draw back, let his mouth run over the bridge of Steven’s nose instead. Joe has his hand on Steven’s hip and his fingertips snap down and in, then flatten. It’s only Joey there but he clutches anyway.

Joey looks at the paper under Steven’s head and is surprised when he sees staffs trailing over it. Three of them can read sheet music if they care to, and Steven has written it before but when he’s made to. Then the paper shifts and Steven moves and Joey looks up.

Steven’s not awake. It’s Joe rolling his shoulder to lift Steven’s head. Joey slides the paper free and Joe thins his lips, then nods at another paper to Joey’s left. More sheet music. Joey takes it up and checks that the ink is dry, and then folds it in his hand. He has a stack of it now, neat and ordered, in a chipped lacquered jewelry box he found in the saloon’s basement behind the furnace.

If Steven remembers it Joey will give it back, and he won’t wait for Steven to ask. Sometimes he gives it back even when Steven doesn’t remember it, if he sees Steven rubbing his fingers together and chewing his lip and staring in space. He knows Joe thinks he should just lock it up for good, but Joe also thinks Steven only goes out when he thinks they’re not pulling their music together, or when he thinks they’re done pulling it for a while.

Joe nods, and dips his head again, and doesn’t wait for Joey to leave before he presses his mouth to Steven’s, eyes closed hard, as if he’s stealing the breath from the other man.

* * *

When Joe left he asked if Joey wanted to come, even though Joey didn’t think things were any better between them. Joey asked Brad once, because he was drunk and stupid, if Joe had asked him that early too, and Brad, more sober, had told him not to think about it. Or about why—because they knew, even then, it was all coming down to Joe and Steven.

Joey stayed because Steven was his brother, and that was true even with all of the shit they’d both piled on top of it. He knew, somewhere, that he wasn’t going to help, that he wasn’t even going to try and help, but if Steven was going to drown then he would be there. He should be there. He never asked Brad about it but Brad would’ve said the same, not to think about it, and so Joey never went any farther than that.

When Joe came out with Steven he asked Joey if they’d wanted that, and Joey had told him, honestly, that they hadn’t even known till Steven had said where he was. He hadn’t seemed to care much after that, and anyway, had spent most of the first few days talking to Brad, so Joey had thought he was following the same advice.

But Steven got him a guitar and he wanted Steven to stay after that. Maybe before that. Joey still didn’t ask, but Joe started asking plenty. Never in so many words, but when Steven rolled himself off the fire escape bleeding it always seemed to be him and Joe who cleaned him up. Joey would have done that even if Joe hadn’t come back, but it was the way Joe got him into it, always waking him up hissing at him, clenched teeth against a pale face, black glower. Like it was his fault for not watching Steven, like his night guard act made him responsible. Like that was going to keep Steven in.

Tom was the one who called the doctor, before he moved out. He still found them, still figured out how to reach them when they needed one, but now Joe handled the calls. Then he and Joey would try and make Steven stay still, shut up, stop trying to make them finish it till the doctor came. More hissing at Joey, even when he was snapping at Steven, because half the time Joe couldn’t look at Steven for that and pretended it was disgust or anger. Once the doctor took so long Joey went out to find him and drag him in, and found him in the stairwell. When they came in Joe had his head down on the table and one arm clamped over it, and the other over Steven’s waist, Steven lying on his side and sleeping so quietly Joey almost slapped him.

And whenever Joey saw them. Joe didn’t care if he saw, but Brad got sneered at and Tom always used it to start an argument about whether Joe fucking _thought_ , since he’d come back. Whether he’d just fucking tried asking. And Joey got asked. Steven always sleeping, or pretending to sleep, at least, or awake but just not caring to look around, and then Joe trying. Mouth to Steven’s temple, back of neck, wherever, hands running slow and careful, like if Joe practiced enough some day he’d be able to do it to Steven’s face. Being sweet, like it’d keep Steven inside. Like he wished it’d keep Steven in. 

Joey didn’t think about it. He didn’t care if Joe was asking him not to, asking to just let it _try_ , at least. That wasn’t why he didn’t think about it.

* * *

They try out the studio before they start renting it to others. Steven hates the sound and spends most of the first half hour punching and kicking the mattresses. One of them’s a featherbed, they didn’t tell him, and when it splits and spits down all over him, Joe and Tom get up like they think Steven is going to ram his head through the wall in revenge.

The idea might actually run through Steven’s head. He stares at the wilted mattress for a moment, and then he sits down and laughs. Tom stops halfway across the room, then goes back to his bass. 

“We should find somebody,” Steven says. He runs his hand through his hair, then uses both hands to fluff the piles of down around him. It’s not all white, more mottled light grey, and when he scoops up some and tosses it at Brad, it looks more like a long plume of smoke than anything else. “Somebody to handle all that shit while we’re playing. I can’t do that and hear the rest of you and remember what the fuck I’m supposed to be singing. I can’t hear the rest of you anyway.”

Joe didn’t stop and now he’s standing behind Steven, watching the patterns Steven’s fingers drag through the down. He twists his guitar so it nudges Steven in the back. “What do you mean?”

“Somebody else.” Steven looks at the long tear running down the mattress and waves his hand behind him. Feathers flick off his fingers and drift across Joe’s legs, dirty grey on black pants.

Behind them, Tom asks Brad if they can use his mattress. Before Brad answers Joey tells them to use his. It’s broken in the middle anyway, and he spent all of last night feeling his back wrench out every time he rolled across it. He’d rather sleep on his clothes again and find a new one in the morning.

“Who else?” Joe asks. His fingers scratch over the guitar and he uses his knee to nudge Steven again. “I thought we moved to get away from people.”

“Joe, the whole plan is we’re inviting everybody over to party soon as we get this shindig going,” Steven sighs. He lifts his arms off his knees, hands hanging from the wrist, and then lets himself fall backwards. His head meets Joe’s legs at the shins, stops, twists, and then slides down to rest on Joe’s feet. “Anyway, motherfucker—”

Joey tosses his keys to Brad, who leaves to get the mattress. Tom puts his bass down again and gets up and goes to where the hammer and nails are lying on the floor, closer to the others than to them. He picks them up and begins rolling the nails in one hand.

“Who the fuck do you want?” Joe snaps. “You’re still bitching about not hearing us and that seems a funny time to get other people to come.”

Steven tenses up, the whole line of him spread out, one knee cocked up, arms in the drifts of feathers, head still cradled between Joe’s shoes. Then he closes his eyes. His chest jumps and his nostrils flare, and over him Joe’s palm flattens down the strings to silence, and then he breathes out. His right hand moves, a twitch, and then it begins to slowly drag itself up, taking the rest of his arm along. He pushes it above his shoulder, then reverses direction.

“Just a thought, Joe,” Steven says, and suddenly sits up. He twists around while the rest of them flinch and looks down at the space in the feathers where he’d been. Then he puts out a finger and adds horns. “But all right, if you’re going to be that uptight about it, I guess we can just keep working with this ramshackle bullshit.”

Joe lifts his hand to his face, then pushes at his hair instead of at his mouth. His lips are pressed too tight together to need the help anyway. “I’m not…what do you mean, you can’t hear? Are you going deaf or something?”

“Said the pot to the kettle,” Steven mutters, and he’s getting to his feet, not looking at Joe, not seeing how Joe catches a shaving cut on his neck with a nail, grimaces, pushes his hand over his neck. “Fuck it.”

“Look, what did you mean?” Joe says, lower. Closer, swinging the guitar back so it’s not cutting between them. “What aren’t you hearing?”

Steven is standing now but still bent over, trying to pull the feathers out of his hair in earnest now. He’s not looking at Joe. “Fuck it.”

“What is it?” Joe says. Even lower, even closer, grabbing at Steven’s shoulder. “Goddamn it. What’s wrong with it? We can’t make it work if we don’t know.”

“That bridge was fucked,” Tom suddenly says, loud and bright. He tosses one nail up in the air, watching it while Joe jerks and looks over and bites down what he’d wanted to say. “You fucked it up, Joey.”

Joey jerks because he did not. It was off but Steven fucking wanted it that way and they’d all been in the room when he’d said so, wanted to try it that way, but when Joey opens his mouth Tom stares through him.

“Was not.” Steven turns towards them. He gazes at them, calm again when he shouldn’t be yet, and then shrugs and picks more feathers out of his hair. “You’re all tone-deaf assholes. You and Joe the most, Tom. I can’t pick out that high note if you two are trying to see who can fuck their baby through the wall the hardest.”

“Oh,” Joe says, his shoulders dropping. He puts his hand back on the guitar and slides through a riff. “Oh. Oh, Jesus, well, fine.”

Brad comes down with the mattress and Joey goes to help him, even though Tom still has the hammer and nails. Tom stays where he is, watching Joe watch Steven, and eventually Steven sits down again. He works on his lyrics while they fix the mattress.

* * *

Joey went out with Steven once. He’d been wondering but he hadn’t planned to go out. He’d just wanted to get Steven down and talk about it, and understand who it was that they’d picked up from the mental institution anyway, but there’d been a wave of bad patrol nights, news coming over the radio that whole packs had been rooted out of this tenement, that sewer line, this old warehouse right by the overhead train tracks. They were supposed to stay inside till the dead were cleared out and they did stay inside, jumping at the shots and sirens, until Joe and Tom had decided to have out some old grudge of theirs.

Tom told Joey afterward that he’d wanted to bring it up, just bring it up and get it out of the way, and that he had to get it out of the way. He didn’t want them to fall apart again, and Joe knew that. They’d had to do it. It hadn’t had to go the way it did once Tom had brought it up, but that wasn’t just Tom’s fault.

He was right, but when it was all of their faults, it didn’t make it easier to stay. It was ugly and it hurt and it held them all under, where it was dark and airless and terrifying, and Joey could stand up like a man but he couldn’t keep sitting there in that vicious stew and suffocating. Steven went out and went by Joey on his way, and maybe he didn’t even ask. He might not have meant anything when he looked over, but Joey didn’t need it to mean something. He just needed to go.

They went down the fire escape. No one was waiting at the bottom and there were no streetlights and on the wind Joey could hear the moaning, that droning endless wail, and he looked back up at the ladder but he heard Steven moving on and he was still just outside, could still hear Tom and Joe. He went after the other man.

The rest of the night would never play out in Joey’s head like a real movie, like he could really remember what happened, no matter how many times he rewound it. He was sober, clear in the head and sober, but afterward everything still jumbled together like someone had taken photos and then mixed them up and taken a handful from the mix to give to him. They walked more than Joey had thought they would, but Tabano came with his car, and a gang of hunters. The things were slow, very slow, but they were dead so they had no warmth, no more than what was around them, so when they touched you at first it could feel like a curtain or a piece of furniture or something else, something harmless. Until they had a grip on you and it was the grip that was bad, that relentless grip. They didn’t feel, so nothing would hurt them into dropping it. Breaking the fingers didn’t break the muscles that wrapped around the bones. You had to cut them off.

They went to a house. Someone was paying them to clear it. A nice brownstone, a place with a chandelier in the hall and too much furniture, too many things they had to move around and look out for, under, behind, over. Steven walked through one room as if he’d lived there, kicking over that chair, pushing that chest, opening the closet. He walked in and around it and back out in one loop, strolling, not looking, not stopping, and they cursed and shot and ducked the grasping dead he turned up.

Fucking uncanny, Joey had heard Tabano muttering, and he had seen Tabano looking at Steven and it wasn’t proud, wasn’t smug, wasn’t taking it for granted. Tabano didn’t like it, didn’t like what Steven did, and he dragged Steven away from going into one house. Maybe the one before, maybe the one after.

Anyway. Tabano liked the pay. He didn’t mind what they did to get it. But he didn’t like what he saw with Steven, and he dragged Steven around like he didn’t think Steven would listen to him. They weren’t paid for that one, he’d told Steven, and Steven had said nobody had told him, and Tabano had told Joey to stop fucking letting Steven wander off. He didn’t think he could keep Steven from coming out either, but he still liked Steven, and he thought he could keep tabs on Steven while Steven was out here.

Somewhere, not in that house but in another one, they found a toy piano, small enough to put on your knee. Some little girl’s toy, in a room with plastic ponies lining the walls and bloodstains on the upturned bed. Steven had played it, and they’d shot a dead woman on the stairs, and Joey could never remember whether that was before or after Steven had played the piano but he remembered Tabano snarling at Steven about it. Asking him, what was wrong with him, what the _fuck_ was his problem, why couldn’t he just—why did it always have to turn out like this? Like all fucked up, as if Tabano even knew what that was.

Like they’d broken something, Tabano had said, and then he’d shut up.

Broken what, Steven had said. What was broken, when the only fucking thing they’d never broken was _that_. And the look in his eyes, the way his voice had twisted, like something too young for the weight of it—they’d known, Tabano and Joey. They’d known he’d go back for that damn piano and they’d stopped him from it. Held him down in the bed of Tabano’s truck till he’d gone limp.

I lost it, you know, Steven had told Joey, sometime in that trip. But it ain’t broke, never broke, never once, not even with everything else. And now I got it back and hell, Joey, I don’t care _how_.

Joey took Steven home at the end, when the memory ran like a story again, like he could keep it in order. But just that time. The other times, Steven came home by himself. Tabano never brought him and Joey didn’t think Tabano even knew where Steven went then.

* * *

Steven lets them cut a couple songs by the end of the day, and then he lies on the torn-down remains of the mattress he broke and listens to them while the rest of them try to figure out what to do about dinner. The gas line in the kitchen has a kink in it somewhere, working yesterday and not today, but now that they have a place that’s halfway presentable they sometimes have friends over and friends can bring food that’s already cooked. Tom’s wife, other women they’re interested in, musician friends who’ve heard about the studio, the odd former employee who still thinks they’re worth a shot for future employment.

Once the food is cooked Joe wants to get out of there, but people have questions. They want to know what’s going on, how it works, when they’ll open up the studio. How much it costs, and already, whether they can cut a deal. Joe doesn’t want to deal with it but he has to, since they’ve discussed it but they haven’t made any conclusions and when that happens he has to answer the questions because he’ll be the one telling Steven what he said. He backs up into a corner and goes sullen but they don’t let him go, and finally Joey picks up another plate and goes back into the other room.

“First one’s good, second one’s fucked,” Steven says, rolling over to make room for Joey. He crawls on his elbows to the plate Joey’s brought him and laughs when he sees the food. “Where’s Joe?”

“Back telling everybody what we’re going to charge,” Joey says. He’s eaten some and is full enough, but it’s still so rare to have that much food around that he doesn’t feel right about leaving it out. He has a plate for himself that he can’t possibly finish but he picks at it anyway. “We going to redo the second one?”

Steven has his mouth full but he tilts his head to the side and considers the question. Then he nods. He swallows, takes another bite, and then pulls himself up to sit where he can see through the hall to just a sliver of the kitchen. Time was that he’d have them all over with him, where he was, and fight it out with Joe who got to answer what. He still likes people around. Even when he goes out, even though Joey only went that once, Joey doesn’t think that Steven takes his bounties without an audience around. But he doesn’t get up and dance for them like he did, like he thought if he didn’t, Joe or Tom or someone else might take them away for good.

That’s probably better. This Steven, he’s going to live for longer than the one who went into the nuthouse. Joey just wishes sometimes that it wasn’t more and more looking like a choice between this Steven and that Steven. There were other ones, too.

“Something wrong?” Steven says. Looking at Joey when Joey wasn’t, looking like he wants an answer.

“Yeah,” Joey says. He asked. “Yeah. Are you sticking with it?” 

Steven keeps looking at Joey, but he starts eating again. He’s not angry or scared or even surprised, and there’s nothing in his eyes that should make Joey nervous, except for the way he keeps looking on and on and on, saying nothing when Joey wants him to have said a book and a half by now. To throw up his hands and be outraged and do all the things he should do, would do, if he had a real feeling about it. These days that’s the hardest to see about this Steven, when he really feels it and when he doesn’t. There were days before, with the drugs, when he didn’t feel a damn thing but you could always tell that. Now you can’t.

“The song?” Steven says.

“No, you fucker,” Joey says back and he’s halfway up before he realizes. He sits back down on the mattress and presses his fists to the sides of his head. “No. Jesus. Steven, what the fuck are you looking for? I mean, can you just fucking say, and then maybe we can try—can help? Can do something? Because it’s driving us all crazy.”

Steven puts down his plate. “I’m trying to make us a band. That’s all I’ve ever—”

“It’s not. It’s not and you know it.” Joey gets up again and this time he makes it to his feet. He walks over and shuts the door and then comes back and kicks the mattress. What’s left of that quarter of it deflates and he stares at the feathers settling across his drums. “Steven, when you go fucking out, you are not trying to make anybody a fucking band. That shit’s got nothing to do with music and you know it. And it’s going to get you killed someday.”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” Steven says, reasonable. He shouldn’t be reasonable. “Then what?”

Joey wants to kick him, but kicks the limp sack of a mattress instead. It jerks under Steven and makes him put his hand down to support himself, so Joey kicks it again and makes Steven roll off it. “I don’t give a shit what the hell you and Joe are doing, but you should fucking stop running off to hunt dead people. Fuck Joe. Fuck him, Steven.”

“Tried that, didn’t we?” Steven splays out his hands behind him, his knees before him, and looks up at Joey from the floor. He’s smiling, his face is smiling, but it’s all just trying to hurt back. “Didn’t that go fucking well.” 

And at least it’s something, at least he’s fucking up for it and deep down Joey might hate himself a little bit for this—because he can hear those echoes, that bite, that sting, in so many other rooms—and deep down Joey might enjoy it too—because he’s waited so _long_ , wanted so much to say this just once, and so fucking what if he’s just going as low—but as much as Joey is fucking this up, at least he’s doing it. He didn’t do it before, when they could have made the time and still had a little of the money, and he thinks about that at night when he sits up and waits for the dead to come take them back. The dead keep coming because the dead know they’re no different, they’re not even lucky, they’re just still too stubborn to see what’s in front of their fucking faces, and if they’re careless one more time, if they forget—then it’s over.

“Yeah, so we fucked it up,” Joey says. “I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry, Steven. I’m sorry but fuck that, it was fucked and wrong. And it’s over. And now I don’t want you to fucking get yourself killed.”

“You’re sweet, Joey. You really are.” Steven’s still smiling like he’s slashing Joey’s throat. “Why don’t you go tell it to Joe? He’s the real romantic around here.”

“Fuck you, Steven.” Joey kicks at the mattress one last time and puts his hands to his head again. “Just why the fuck are you trying so hard? When the fuck did you want to die? What the fuck _broke_ you?”

“Nothing,” Steven says.

“Bullshit,” Joey says.

He’s not expecting anything from that. He just says it, just spits it, fed up and bitter, and Steven jerks like Joey belted him across the face. “I’m _not_ ,” Steven snaps.

Steven pushes himself up, like he’s coming for Joey, and Joey gets down in Steven’s face, like he’s going to meet him, and they stare across less than an inch at each other. They’re going to kill each other this way.

“What was it?” Joey says.

“Fuck you,” Steven says, and his voice cracks. He sways and his head goes into Joey’s shoulder. His hand comes up and hits Joey, and then drops and then comes up again and pushes its knuckles into Joey’s chest. “ _Fuck_ you.”

His voice cracks again, and then his breathing does and Joey doesn’t know what to do so he sits still. Steven coughs and Joey feels wet spraying his chest. Then Steven breathes in, shaking, grinding his head on Joey’s shoulder to keep upright, and Joey does the only thing he can do and punches the floor by them.

“It wasn’t anything,” Steven finally says. “It was just—me. I was the only one who could’ve done it, anyway.”

“Done what?” Joey asks.

Steven breathes in again and his shoulders move as if he’s pushing off mountains. “Out,” he says, and looks up. “I got out.”

The door opens and Joe looks at them. “The fuck are you doing?” he rasps, looking back and forth between them. “Steven?”

Joey gets up. Steven’s already turning around and he helps that along with a push with his knee to Steven’s shoulder. Joe slews to follow him and Joey just pushes him, too, and shakes it off when Joe pushes back.

“I’m not broken,” Steven calls after Joey. He gets up, leaning, his leg hurting him, and Joe looks at the damn leg but that’s all so Joey goes back and gets Steven’s arm, and shoves him into Joe’s grip. “I’m—damn it, Joey, I’m not.”

“Then what the hell is it about?” Joey snaps. “Trying to fix that?”

“What are you talking about?” Joe says.

“You fucking ask him for once,” Joey tells him, and walks out the door.

* * *

“He’s broken,” Tom had said to Joey. “Something happened in there.”

Joey hadn’t wanted to talk about it. “Something happened out here. Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Tom had sat with him a while. One of the few times, before he’d left the apartment. He’d been so big on sticking together before, one of the things he and Steven agreed on, one reason he’d stayed, and then afterwards he’d always been looking to get out. He was still with them, still the first to talk about what they had to do to watch their backs, but he’d do the watching from his place.

“What about Joe?” Joey finally said.

“Joe? Joe’s not so bad,” Tom said. “He’s still bitter. I think he’ll live. But Steven’s fucked.”

“Well, so what are you saying?” Joey asked him. “We went and fucking got him anyway. Are you saying that was a waste of time?”

“I think we’re all fucked,” Tom answered, after a long, long time. He had sat there quietly for a little longer, and then had gotten up.

* * *

Everyone leaves before sundown. Some people are already asking to stay over, but Joe’s not having it and Steven is not interested in fighting it. He’s working on his music again and flat-out telling Joey to get this or that from that box of Joey’s he’s not supposed to know about. In the end Joey goes up, gets the box, brings it down and dumps it out in front of Steven. Then he goes to bed. He’s done.

In the middle of the night he gets up and he goes downstairs. They’ve blocked off the basement but he still dreams of the trapdoor in the sidewalk out front, dreams it’s wide open and the dead are slithering down the chute where they used to drop new crates of booze. So he gets up and he’s not halfway down the stairs when he hears Steven singing.

Steven’s pulled all the down back into the mattress and closed up the rip somehow. He’s curled on it, scatting and rhyming, and Joe’s next to him half-sleeping over the second guitar Steven got him. When Joey’s foot hits the floor Joe puts his hand out on his rifle and looks over, then puts his head down again and keeps his arm out.

“I got out, Joey,” Steven says, and Joey stops and Joe sits up. Steven writes in the margins of the saloon’s old account ledger that they found under the bar. “It’s about I got out and I’m not going back in. Never again.”

“You’re not in there,” Joe says. He spreads his hands even though Steven’s not looking at him. “Why are you always leaving? What the hell are you running from now?”

And he isn’t looking at Joey, but he sees Joey’s start and then he turns. He thinks Joey shouldn’t be so fucking surprised, as if Joe goes and takes someone else’s advice every day, as if he’s ever just flat-out asked Steven before. As if he’s asking the actual fucking question, still.

“Why the fuck are you leaving us?” Joey says.

“I’m not leaving,” Steven starts, and Joe wraps his hand so tight around the guitar neck that the wood bends. “I’m coming back, motherfucker. I’m always coming back. I keep coming and I don’t know fucking why, all right, because I’m damned if I know where any of you are going.”

“What are you talking about?” And then Joey knows.

Steven looks up. “You left. I was in there and you—”

“We came back for you—”

“I got fucking _out_ , Joey, and you know it,” Steven snaps. “I got out, and I went back for Joe, and I got out again and you were there that time but even if you hadn’t been, I would’ve fucking been out. And I would’ve fucking come back for you.”

“Why the fuck do you do that?” Joey snaps back. Because yes, he knows and he hates it and he hates himself, looking back, knowing what he did, but it was what they all did. And he’s sat up so many nights, looking at it, waiting for it to come back for him, and now that it has it turns out he’s not so afraid. It’s ugly, but it’s them. He can look at it. “Because you fucking do, and you don’t have to. And we didn’t have to come back, but we did.”

Steven grimaces, but his anger doesn’t get put down that easy. “You let them put me in there. I wouldn’t have.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we did.” Joey sees Joe start, as if he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe that stupid asshole didn’t ask that one either—no, Brad had to have told him. Brad would tell him. But he wouldn’t see it, wouldn’t see what Brad told and get what it _meant_ , because he’s just so fucking caught up in his fights, as if it was all about his leaving and Steven bringing him back. As if they didn’t all go. “Yeah. We thought it’d help.”

“You thought it’d shut me up,” Steven throws back.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Joey snarls. “Yeah, we did. You were fucking gone, Steven. You needed to get the fuck out of the shit you were in, but you wouldn’t, and we weren’t going there with you. So we did that. And you’re out. And it got fucked up, but you’re out and you’re fucking here again, and I don’t want you back in either. So where I’m fucking going, it’s here. I’m here to stay.”

“You did that to him?” Joe says.

Joey takes a step towards him before thinking. Then he stops himself, while Steven whips around and knocks Joe off-balance, off the rifle, and then thinks too. He opens his mouth but Steven laughs.

“ _You_ did it,” he tells Joe. “You too, Joe Perry. You let me go. So here I’m out and by my own self, and fuck you. _Fuck_ you.”

It hurts Joe. A lot. He lets Joey see it, lets Steven see it, sitting there, guitar twisted in his hand, staring at Steven like he wants to say fuck-you back but he knows he can’t. Not on this one, not even to spare his pride, and so he just sits there and hurts and he knows he did it himself. When Steven moves Joe flinches.

Steven pauses, then lifts his hand. He wasn’t moving that before. Joey didn’t see what he moved, just that he did, and so Joey doesn’t know what Steven had meant to do before. But now Steven shakes his hand, as if he’s trying to get something off it. He doesn’t and he shakes it again, and then he laughs and puts his hand to the side of his head. His fingers keep shaking against his hair.

“I did it,” he says quietly. “I did it. I’m sorry, Joey. I really am. I just…I don’t know. You know, I really don’t. It’s been too long since I got out, I forgot. I don’t know anymore. I just—I just remember, I wanted a band. I wanted to write music, and play it, and sing it, and just live it. But I got out of that.”

He moves his head and his hand sticks, and when he tries to pull it out, he takes some of his hair with him. He winces and puts his hand back, then jerks it away when Joe moves. Joe keeps going, leaves the guitar and pulls himself over onto his hands, right up by Steven. He sits down and Steven leans over and kisses him, like it’s nothing, like it’s just what they do, and Joe’s hand comes up and fists in Steven’s hair, pulling out more of it than Steven did. He holds it when Steven twists, then presses closer. When they break he doesn’t let go, just curls his fingers deeper into Steven’s hair. He lays his head on Steven’s shoulder like Steven always has on his, and breathes in as if he’s cracked something inside.

For a while Steven looks at him. Then he sighs and closes his eyes. “So why are you up, Joey?” he says.

“Because I’m around,” Joey says. He takes a seat where he can see the windows. “Why are you?”

“I’m trying,” Steven says, as if he meant for something else to go after it. But instead he shakes his head. He makes Joe think he’s doing something and Joe straightens up, but Steven just lies down. He reaches around Joe and runs his nail across the guitar strings. “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep, Joey. You going to be up?”

Joe glances over and he could say something, but instead he nods at Joey. He lets Steven have the guitar and fits himself on the mattress so he can slide his fingers down the neck of the guitar while Steven plucks at the body, so Joey has a clear line to the rifle on the floor and Joe doesn’t.

“Yeah,” Joey says, watching. “Yeah, I’ll be a while.”

* * *

_Tom_

They’ve shut down the bridges in and out of Manhattan again. The tunnels haven’t been open since the dead started coming up and the daily quota for the bridges is so small that there’s a black market for substitutes to wait in line for black market passes out. But now there’s a big outbreak somewhere up in Westchester, so even the bridges are closed.

Steven knows people who know people, so they heard about it a couple days before it happened and they bought up before the food prices began shooting up past the skyscrapers. The studio’s up and going now, and a couple recording geniuses from the old days have somehow miraculously found them and are working for what’s left of the music scene, so they have the cash for it. That, and Steven’s still taking bounties.

Nobody likes it. Joe likes it so much he spends the mornings talking nice to get people to come in and record, and the afternoons telling Tom how they have to get off their fucking asses and make it fucking work for once, as if they’re all just sitting around shooting crack again. They’re trying, damn it. They’re all out on their feet, looking for anybody with a little cash and half a tune when they’re not going over their own shit, recording and re-recording till the tape’s so thin it looks like silver. Anything to keep Steven in the goddamn studio, to keep him _inside_.

It doesn’t work. Tom catches Tabano one day and offers him a wad of cash with one hand, waves the tommy gun with the other, and makes him swear not to mention any more purges to Steven. Tabano keeps his promise, because while he’s an overbearing shit, he does feel something for Steven, and he’s as mad as they are when they catch Steven two days later, sneaking in after curfew with enough money to keep them in hot water and electricity to the end of the month, plus blood all over his left side.

Steven’s with it enough to yell at them for trying to take him in where the recording equipment is, in case they drip blood on something important and ruin it. They lay him out where behind the bar used to be, where there’s still a drain and hook-ups for a hose, and Tom starts thumbing through his list of doctors.

Doctors are hard to find, even harder to keep track of. A lot of them went down at the beginning, before everyone really got their heads around the fact that Romero was a goddamn visionary prophet, and afterwards, the military took most of them in. For protection, for research, for just being a fucking pain in the ass. Here and there a couple stayed clear, unlicensed or anarchist or just too goddamn ornery to want to wait for an armed escort before they went out. But they move around a lot for the same reasons. Tom has to call a guy who knew a guy who dated a girl who answered the phone, pre-living dead, for somebody before he gets anywhere. By the time they finally get a damn doctor over, Steven’s gone through two bags of blood.

Not that they know fuck all about medicine, but they know their way around a needle and a vein, all right, and turns out Brad was enterprising enough to charge a couple of the healthier-looking bands in blood instead of cash. (Tom would ask how Brad knew Steven’s blood type, except fuck it. That would assume he cares, and even now, even after all the shit they’ve been through, his preference is to just wave a magic wand over it and move on.)

Steven nicked a vein, putting his hand through a windowpane. Once the glass comes out, it’s easy-peasy to sew up, says the doc. He also thinks Steven has a cracked rib or two, wants them to chance a med center and get him x-rayed, like they wouldn’t just get shot straight off if they walked up to one of those, bloody and staggering post-curfew.

“Fuck it,” Steven mutters. He curls up on himself soon as the doctor gives him back his arm. “Fuck it. Not broken. I know fucking broken.”

“Yeah?” Joe slumps down at the edge of the table, head between his arms, digging fistfuls of hair into his grimy fingers. “Yeah, you would.”

Steven looks at him. “I’m sober, fuckhead.”

“You’re really not,” Tom says.

Joe puts one arm down on the table, laying his forearm like a bar between Tom and Steven, and twists around to glower. He’s more of an asshole now than he was before, coked-up and tuned out and ready to cut all their throats on his way out. The whole institution, zombies, reunion deal resized Joe’s ego some, but now it’s not that he thinks he’s better than them. It’s that he thinks he’s no better than Steven.

There’s still blood all over the place. Sticky footprints around the table, tacky fingerprints on the sink faucet. When Tom pushes the hair out of his face, he swipes blood over his cheek, and when he picks up a rag and scrubs at it, he just gets more on his chin. He swears and throws the rag into the trashcan, and then shoves his way over to the sink. “Fuck this.”

“Total agreement,” Steven says.

“Fuck you,” Tom says, slapping the knob with the bend of his wrist. He scratches the blood from his hands, then cranes his head under the water and pushes his fingertips into his cheek, jaw. “Fuck you, fuck Joe, shut the fuck up, _Joe_ , and fuck all the fucking blood you just fucking got all over this place. Jesus, Steven, I just fucking cleaned this room.”

Joe’s still trying to rip Tom a new one, half-rising out of the chair, but Steven’s long jagged laugh gets in the way. He looks at Steven, kneading the table edge, and then sits down. One of his hands twitches for the frets and for a stupid moment Tom feels for Joe. 

“Sorry, man.” Steven turns, painfully, onto his back. The doc said he didn’t need any more blood, just lots of fluids and rest, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the way the color slides off his face. “Next time I’ll just do it on the doorstep.”

“Don’t fucking go at him now,” Joe says. Tiredly, without real spite in it, but still, he says it. He rubs at the side of his face, then reaches out, puts his hand under Steven’s shoulder to ease the other man down. He’s full of sweet touches like that these days, like Steven’s his girl.

Tom bites the side of his mouth, like he hadn’t just finished cleaning the blood off the outside of it. He shakes the water off his hands and knocks shut the tap. “Fuck this.”

“Hey, Hamilton,” Steven starts.

“Fuck it,” Tom snaps, turning. “Your ribs broken or not?”

Joe goes off again, always trying to defend shit that doesn’t need to be defended, that _shouldn’t_ be defended, and caring fuck all about the shit that does. He’s got this stupid fucking idea of a gentleman in him, something leftover from their upbringing, Tom guesses. Why the fuck he’s still holding onto it is anyone’s guess. Sure, Tom’s remembered his manners since they all went sober, but that’s giving people a goddamn reason to talk to them again. It’s not whatever the hell Joe thinks it is, like some quest that’s going to end in a treasure and a happy ending.

Steven gets it. Steven likes to pretend he’s better than he is, likes to talk up his shit, but he knows he’s no fucking gentleman. He knows he’s capable, more than the rest of them, of tearing this place to the ground. He looks Tom in the eye and snorts, and his lip curls a little but all that irritation ain’t pretense. It might be unjustified but it’s real.

“You need a shower,” Tom tells him.

Steven, he snorts again and lifts his arms. Shuts Joe right up, holding out his hands to Tom, and Tom doesn’t like this either but at least he knows where it’s coming from.

Tom stays where he was and rolls his eyes. Because he knows where it’s coming from.

“Aww, Tom,” Steven laughs, letting Joe pull him up. His arm flops around Joe’s shoulders and he drops his head into Joe’s hair, hissing in pain as he negotiates his legs from the table to standing. “Aw, Tom. Come on. I’m trying.”

“Fuck you. You’re always trying and I’m still trying to give a shit,” Tom says, kicking a chair out of their way. “Get the fuck out so I can clean this shithole.”

* * *

Plenty of showers that they took together. Marble tiles and gold-plated settings down to grimy concrete and broken drains. That sick orange linoleum in the last jail, in the one where they finally threw up their hands and got in a shrink, one that wasn’t on the label’s payroll, and just put Steven—somewhere.

With them wasn’t working. It wasn’t working so bad that even bringing back Joe wouldn’t have helped, and Tom had thought about that since then. He’d had to, what with all the bullshit ideas Joe had had about what had gone down in his absence, as if the asshole had had any right to judge. Any goddamned right. He’d left. Fucking abdication, through and through, and he didn’t even ask, let alone have any idea.

So with them hadn’t been working, and with or without Joe hadn’t worked, and they didn’t know what was going to, except they weren’t going to find it. Later, when they had the time and the space and the mental capability, of course Joey had questioned that too. He meant well, just wondering if he’d tried hard enough, if he’d been as good a friend as he could have been, just blaming himself. And he had a point: they hadn’t been good enough. They’d been fucked out of their brains on drugs too, just not as far down yet, even if every day Tom woke up and still saw Terry’s face next to him he wondered what the hell _she_ was thinking. But Steven hadn’t been good enough either. Tom was never going to lose sleep over that kind of competition.

What it came down to, in Tom’s opinion, was: what could they do. And what they could do, was stick Steven somewhere else. They couldn’t keep him with them, but they had to keep him. Keep him till they could figure out what would work, because damn it, they loved him. He was godawful hell, but he was theirs.

Nobody could blame them for not seeing the zombies coming.

* * *

Brad doesn’t exactly help clean the kitchen, but he figures out what to do about getting a meal together without it tasting like Steven’s been dripping an artery all over it, and Joey lends a hand with a mop. Then Terry shows up, that pinched look on her face, and Tom is sorry, knows it’s almost curfew, knows he was never going to make it home in time and he should’ve at least checked if somebody had cut their damn phone line again, but she doesn’t even start. She shakes her head, leaning in the doorway, and cuts off Joey with a wave of her hand.

“Steven and that’s it,” she says. “Stop there. Give me the goddamn towel.”

Tom kisses her temple as he hands it over and slides past her. She’s so much older these days—not _aged_ , but older. Skin tight like drumskins over her cheekbones, tight and papery under Tom’s lips, eyes too weary to even light in rage. The thought of her walking through the streets by herself makes his chest ache, even with all the guns and knives he’s found for them, even with all the ways she’s learned to use them, and he makes her do it anyway and she does it. She’s beautiful.

He looks under the piano first, then works his way into the upstairs bathroom. Joe’s sitting against the wall, head on Steven’s shoulder so Tom can’t see his face. He has his arm around Steven’s back, his knee up to brace too, and his other hand on Steven’s thigh. The only time his hands stop moving for his guitar is when they’re both on Steven.

“At least your clothes are on,” Tom says.

Steven faces the door and has watched Tom all the way from the piano. He’s changed his clothes, or Joe has changed his clothes, and his hair is knotted up at the back of his head so a steady trickle runs from the base of the knot into his collar. He shrugs and Joe snarls, but it’s Steven who answers. “What’s your problem, Hamilton?”

“My problem is you’re still fucking addicted,” Tom says.

Joe…doesn’t. He sits there and goes white in the face, because yes, damn him, yes, he still doesn’t trust Steven one damn inch either, however much he acts like Steven will shatter into a million pieces if they aren’t. Careful. As if he’s learned much about caring.

As if Tom gives a fuck, and then Tom closes and opens his eyes and remembers he does, and damn himself. He hears Steven start to get up, hears the real anger in Steven’s voice—that and the fear—and turns away. “Oh, fuck you, Steven. You know I don’t mean to that.”

“Well, then, what?” Joe says. He’s got his voice back, too loud and strident, like any of them think Steven missed his pause. “The fuck do you mean, saying that?”

“Joe,” Steven says, quietly, and Tom looks back. Steven can do that, still. Stand there and just _pull_ , just make people turn and watch. Damn him. He wavers, shuffles towards Tom and then puts his hand back and down on Joe, needing the support. Still looks at Tom. “I’m…I’m _trying_.”

“Yeah, well, you always do, and then what happens.” The words burn at Tom’s tongue, just for a moment, like kissing a match, and then fade to cold grit. He swallows hard and just ends up with it coating his throat, all dry and scratchy. “You fucking _can’t_. You just fucking can’t do it, Steven. That’s all there is, it’s not rocket science, and you can’t even do that. You never could.”

Steven jerks his head, just a little, just enough to slide from weak and sorry to vicious. “Fuck. Goddamn it, so what the fuck—what, you’re gonna stick me in another asylum?”

“If I can find one,” Tom snaps back.

He thinks Joe would punch him, if Steven wasn’t still holding him down by the shoulder. Joe’s feet stab and skid across the floor, and over him Steven smiles like the sun’s come out and fried all those goddamn crawling corpses back to the stone ages. “I knew you gave a fuck,” he says to Tom.

Tom slams the door on him.

* * *

Terry never asked why Tom stayed. He put her through so much more than she deserved, so much more than she ever had a right to see or hear or have to deal with, but credit where credit was due, he never hid and she never pretended. She knew what she had on her hands and she knew what she couldn’t fix, what she couldn’t handle. She handled what she could, kept him out of some of their money—even saw the decline of the banks coming and got them into gold—and kept the hell away from the rest.

It was the whole Joe versus Steven thing, part of it. And Elyssa, part of it. And revenge on all that bullshit, part of it. But part of it just was that she got it. She didn’t ask because she saw what Tom did, felt what Tom did, understood like he did what would happen if they walked away from it and wanted it as bad as he did. So they were in it together. It didn’t help as much as somebody might’ve thought.

The thing was, even if she got it, she still wasn’t around for it. She still didn’t have to handle it. That was it, having it right on your hands and never getting it to come off.

* * *

Curfew comes down and they’re all stuck there for the night. At least nobody’s recording tonight so they have the extra room.

Joey called his latest girlfriend over just before time, and they help Terry pry one of the mattresses off the wall. Brad gets them some spare sheets. Tom checks the basement and the back door, sees that the locks and hinges are solid, the bars are down, the sorry excuses for tripwires they’ve got are up and semi-working, and meets Joe in the kitchen.

“I don’t want to do this right now,” Tom tells him. “I’m tired. I still smell like Steven cut his wrist all over me, and he’s an asshole. You’re an asshole.”

Joe’s mouth tightens. He’s in the middle of unwrapping leftovers, which they seal up in plastic when they can get it, otherwise it gets wrapped in however many layers of scrap paper it takes to stop seeing the grease stains and shoved in the fridge, even if it doesn’t need it or there’s a blackout on. Jury’s still out on whether the living dead have much of a sense of smell, but nobody sees the point in taking chances.

He looks down at the half-unfolded paper, two fingers testing the edge of a sheet, and then he looks up at Tom. “Well, we have to. Or else next time he just isn’t going to come back, and you know it.”

“Yeah, clearly. Do you?” Tom can hear Terry and Joey’s girl in the next room over. Can’t make out what they’re saying, but he can hear the rise and fall of their voices, the way they lilt. “Fuck this.”

“You keep saying that. Doesn’t make it happen, does it?” Then Joe twists the side of his mouth, like he’s trying to tear off his own lips. He pulls savagely at the paper, then jerks it aside and stares at the plate of cold cuts. “I’m still not sorry I left.”

Tom finally gives up and goes to the stove. He pours some water into a pot to heat and then looks around for what’s left of the case of instant coffee Joey brought it. Like cowboys, like camping as a kid all over again, except now it’s because of the cost. The studio eats electricity. If it was just the money, hell, yes, they’d keep Steven out there taking bounties. Nobody wants to talk about it but just recording the other bands trapped on this hellhole island isn’t going to pay their way.

“He’s not sorry I left,” Joe adds. He’s still looking at the plate, his fingers flicking at the rim. He shakes his head and his voice lifts softly in wonder. “He’s not even mad about that. You know, of all the shit he does blame me for, and then…”

“Well, nobody blames you for leaving,” Tom says. The gas flickers and sputters, barely enough to show a flame. They’re not scheduled for a blackout that he knows of, and fuck, but it’s getting into fall. If they lose the heat tonight they’ll have to suck it up and share one bed to keep warm. “It was a long time coming, and by then there wasn’t any other way it was going to go. Somebody had to.”

Joe shakes his head again. He doesn’t believe. Fucking dreamer. “I just think, if somebody had chilled out—I’m not saying anybody in particular. I’m just saying, you know, if we’d had time to just…think…”

“Nobody left anybody any damn time. You had to leave. It had to go down like that.” Tom smiles at Joe when Joe looks over, and sees how Joe wants to flinch. They’ve known each other too long, even if some people forget that. That, and Tom used to be shy and scared and used to think Joe wasn’t, but that died a long time ago. “Doesn’t mean I forgot about all the fucking shit you pulled leading up to it, and Steven doesn’t either.”

The flush comes hard into Joe’s face, all fury and shock. “I remember a whole hell of a lot too.”

“Good,” Tom says, and means it. He jiggles the pot handle just because it’s there. “Jesus Christ, Joe. We’re not really going to put him back in any institution, all right? Even if we could find one, which there aren’t any now, because they’re all filled with fucking soldiers, it’s pretty fucking obvious that that way just doesn’t _work_ either.”

“I can’t believe you thought it would,” Joe says, like he could slit Tom’s throat with the words.

Tom wishes he could punch Joe. He probably has, at some point. He never was for physical demonstrations the way Steven was, the way Joe can work up to, but he has his boundaries and he’s had them crossed, and fuck it, he remembers enough to know he’s got holes in his memory. He wishes, but he’s not going to fill that hole this way. “You think—you really think, if you stayed, it’d go down different? He’d be dead, you asshole. You two were killing each other. He was going to end up dead without you, without us doing what we did, but when you were _there_ you were damn well helping it happen. And you didn’t give a flying shit, Joe.”

Joe presses his hands against the table till they’re ashy. He still has Steven’s blood under his nails, him and Tom both, and he can’t pretend he’s not listening to Tom now, not dead straight sober. Not after he left and they did what they did without him, and now he’s back and he wants, he _wants_ so badly Tom can taste the bitterness, to fill in that gap, to get it back, but he can’t get back what he never had. He might be the other half of Steven’s fucking mess, might be the key to the magic of what they were and what they should be, what they still want to be, damn it, even with zombies and wartime lives, but he will forever have left. And Tom doesn’t blame him, truthfully, but Tom does damn well appreciate it.

“Well, I do now,” Joe finally says. “I give a shit. It doesn’t stop him. So what now?”

“I don’t know.” Tom laughs at Joe’s snarl. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I really am, Joe. I know you want it to be you, but if it was, we wouldn’t have just put him away. We didn’t even fucking know you were in there. We lost track because he was such a goddamn—I was thinking of leaving, at the end there. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

It’s Joe’s turn to smile. “Because you always thought about it, motherfucker. Whether it could be you.”

They stand there, watching the scars open up. On the stove the water finally comes to a boil, but Tom lets it spit till a drop catches his hand. He hisses then and turns to drop in the coffee.

“It’s okay, you know,” Joe says. “I got over that.”

“I don’t even care who it is now,” Tom says to the bubbling water. “I just want it to stop.”

* * *

Tom went to see Steven exactly once after the asylum took him. Joey went nearly every week, unless the drugs or his girlfriend or something else got in the way—which happened often enough, but still he made it out there enough times to end up seeing one of the nurses for a few days, just before it all went to hell and they all forgot on purpose to ask about her. Terry made it out a few times, too, and Tom always went with her but he went in just that once.

It had been a good day for Steven. Quiet, no fits or tantrums, no suborning of the orderlies to get him forbidden substances, no discovery of makeshift weapons. No injuries. He just couldn’t get out of bed, so of course he couldn’t do anything bad, so that was good for him. 

He hadn’t even looked conscious, though his eyes had been open. Wide and staring, like a corpse, and Tom had caught his hand twitching against his hip but he’d stayed put till he’d finally seen Steven blink. A good day.

He’d let Terry drive them back and then he’d gone out. Tom had never been one for the monster binges like Steven and Joe, never really had figured out how they crawled out of those brain-shattering crashes. No, he’d liked his highs steady and constant, if not stratospheric. Maybe that had saved him, in the long run, but he hadn’t given a single fucking thought to the long run that night. He couldn’t remember that night.

Terry told him, eventually, in screaming fits and in crying jags, what she remembered and what she’d been told and had found out. Brad had a little, Joey some more. A half-hour there from another friend, fifteen minutes from some label hanger-on, two lines in a gossip column. And he did remember how he felt the next day, as if something had been rotting and rotting in him and finally he’d gotten up the balls to just cut it out, because that was better. But then it was all empty, where the rot had been, and he just knew he didn’t have anything to fill it up.

So he hadn’t gone back till the dead had started coming back and Joey had showed up on his doorstep, panicking and pounding the door, with Brad beside him and a message from some nurse Steven had sweet-talked into phoning for him. He hadn’t seen the need to. Steven would get better or not; nothing Tom could do about that. And in the meantime, there hadn’t been anything in that asylum that could help him.

* * *

Terry’s a bad sleeper. None of them do too well these days, except maybe psychos like Dufay, but she’s worse than most. She can’t stay out for more than a couple hours at a time, and goes at least fifteen minutes between naps. She tries to just wait it out, most of the time, and Tom tries to give her the space and the time and the quiet.

But tonight she wakes up angry, finally ready to lay into him, and he’s earned it, he’ll admit it, but he can’t take it yet. She ends up knotted into a ball on one end of their borrowed mattress while he stalks into the kitchen to see if Joe’s left any of the coffee.

Instead Tom finds Joey and Steven chatting over a fresh pot, as if it’s not two-thirty in the morning with sirens moaning from the north and ice in the air. They lost heat for a while around one and it’s just come back on. The gas flame is turned up as far as it can go, but it barely makes any difference. Tom turns it off, and Steven stops talking and Joey only tries for a few more words.

Joey has a quilt around him. Steven’s in a couple layers of clothes, a beat leather jacket over a wrinkled tuxedo shirt over a woman’s sheer blouse, and he’s shivering, though it takes a moment to see that it’s shivering and not just him twitching around like usual. He cups his hands over the steam of his mug and kicks his feet so the table shakes, rattling against the shotgun on it till Joey takes that off.

Tom doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t even want coffee. He just wants—he wants to go back to sleep. To flop down and curl up with Terry and just fucking let it go for a while.

“Hey,” Joey starts, but he’s already losing the will. He offers Tom some coffee and then fidgets with his gun.

Since they shut down the bridges again, milk’s been a bitch to come by. There’s the canned and powdered shit, but you have to thin it out or mix it up, and most of the time nobody has the energy. They do have sugar, and Steven makes as if to offer up the bowl, but Tom just picks up his mug and drinks it straight. It’s watery, burnt, with grit swirling through it that sticks in Tom’s teeth and feels like gravel against his tongue. He grimaces, recognizing Steven’s handiwork, and thinks about making his own batch. But no, fuck it, it’s crap but it’s not _deliberate_ crap, it’s not worth the fucking fight when Steven takes offense, and it’s just. It’s late. He’s tired. He doesn’t want this, but it’s all he’s going to get.

Joey tries a few more times to restart the conversation, and God knows that he and Steven don’t usually defer to Tom (more than once Tom’s wondered what-if with Steven and Joey, if it’d been good-natured, tolerant, needy Joey instead of Joe, if it would have been… _easier_ that way, easier, if not so brilliant, and that answers it right there) but Steven isn’t playing now and Joey isn’t pushing. Eventually Joey just gets up, mutters something about checking the locks. Steven wants him to leave the shotgun and Joey snorts and smacks Steven’s hand and leaves, dragging the quilt behind him.

“So,” Steven says, head still turned to watch Joey go. “So, we gonna do this?”

Tom pours himself more coffee he has no intention of drinking. “Is Joe going to waltz in and try to defend your honor again?”

Steven laughs and slouches in the chair. His coat rides up on his arms, shoving the top of the collar into his ears, pushing back his hair so Tom can see dark splotches along Steven’s neck. Soft and spreading, and Steven winces when he goes to fold down the collar and misses and presses his fingers into one bruise. Trying to be sweeter, these days, Joe, but that’s only one side of it at best. They both still leave their marks on each other. “Why don’t you just say what you’re gonna say, Tom, and Joe can take it or leave it. It’s not all about him.”

“It’s not all about him shit,” Tom snorts. He puts down the pot of coffee and reaches for the sugar. It’s a waste, seeing as he won’t be drinking it, but fuck it. Right now he doesn’t care. “Contrary to appearances, Steven, I don’t actually dig being the goddamn excuse for your make-up fucking.”

“Well, _con_ trary to appearances, Tom,” Steven goes, putting on his posh accent. “I don’t actually dig being called a fucking addict when—”

“You are and you know it,” Tom snaps. His fingers slip on the sugar bowl and it clatters hard on the table. Doesn’t break, doesn’t tip over, but the noise of it seems to ring through the building. “You and your fucking bounties, your zombie psychic skills, you think we’re always going to be here to put you fucking back together? You’re just going to keep crawling out there and getting torn up, and—”

“No, I don’t, not when you already dropped me _once_ ,” Steven snarls back. Suddenly he’s on the edge of his seat, straining towards Tom, feral and shaking. He’s always been able to go there, to just throw his everything out and never mind that he’ll fall to pieces in the aftermath, he doesn’t even _think_ of that, just does it, and that’s why he’s the terrifying one. “You think I forgot?”

Except—Tom is so tired. Even his fear is tired. It drags at him with trembling nails instead of clawing in, and all he can do is shake his head. “No.”

Steven hangs there for a moment longer, just on the line, all the dark things twisting in the fractures, and then he breathes in. Pulls himself back and slides his elbows onto the table and his hands across the sides of his face, and then Tom sees how tired he is. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck. Fuck, Tom. I’m trying. I mean, you think I _like_ this? I like it like I like fucking myself with a hot poker.”

“Yeah,” is all Tom says. Because, honestly, he’s had his thoughts on that question, but right now he thinks Steven’s being sincere. Here and now, as best he can, and at this point Tom guesses that’s all Steven can even give.

Steven sighs, deep and heavy, and continues to rub at his face. “I try. Even though I wasn’t the only fucking one who could’ve been institutionalized—”

So Joe had been, too, Tom almost says. So Joey had been, even if they’d gotten him out right away and had left Steven in there. So actually, yeah, Tom can and will admit to some guilt over how that had happened, some blame over the path to that point. He was friends with Steven, once, and Steven was a friend to him, once. He’s more than a little fucked up but he knows insane asylums aren’t what a good friend does. But instead he says: “Well, we were faster.”

That raw anger comes up in Steven again, raw because it’s hurt, genuinely, deeply, bone-deep hurt, and he stares at Tom till he cracks abruptly. Puts his head on the table and laughs. “True.”

Tom looks over his shoulder, on instinct, and no one’s in the doorway.

“Joe’s sleeping,” Steven says quietly, into the table. “He wanted to talk to me about you and we had a fight, and I said something and he said why didn’t I just fucking _go_. And then he’s, he’s swearing and, and, and begging, and it took me a handjob and a half to get him to just let me go long enough to take a piss. He always sleeps like a rock after that kind of shit.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Tom says. He shrugs when Steven shifts, even though Steven doesn’t lift his head to see it. “He’s just too fucking terrified to talk to you.”

“Terrified, shit.”

“He’s always been fucking terrified of you,” Tom tells him, and then drinks the coffee he wasn’t going to. It’s lukewarm now, and the room’s not any less chilly. He gets up and turns the stove back on, fuck the gas bill. Joey and his shotgun can discuss that with the debt collectors. “Since the beginning. It’s just he got his head in his ass about it for a while.”

Steven arches his shoulders, and under the table Tom sees him wrap his hand around his bandaged arm, picking at the edges. “He scared the shit out of _me_. I mean, I know everybody thinks it was just hallelujah and come to Jesus, that first time I saw him play, and it _was_ but you know, it’s also really fucking likely to make you fucking shit yourself when you see the face of God.”

“Don’t call him that.” Tom sits back down. “He’s still got that ego.”

“But I’m saying,” Steven insists, with a hollow chuckle. “You know.”

“Yeah.” The gas smells a little, just a sharpness in the air from where the flame didn’t catch right away. Tom grimaces at it and then closes his eyes. “We thought you were already broken when we—I mean, that’s _why_. You were so fucking gone, Steven, and the hell did we know what to do with it. And I would do it again, if it would help. We can’t do…yeah, fine, we’re fucked too, maybe we should all be in there. But that’s not going to fix it. It might make us all even but that’s not fixing it.”

Steven stills, just the occasional longer breath making itself be heard. He’s been collapsed over the table like that so many times, in so many other rooms, and Tom drinks even more of the shit coffee just to cut the memories. Doesn’t want to remember the bloodstains, the piles of cocaine, the smell of urine and stale beer and the whine of dying amps. It’s hard enough, figuring out what he feels now. He doesn’t need the past coming up and making it even more complicated.

He looks in the doorway again, habit, and sees what he’s expecting this time. Joe leaning against the jamb, arms crossed over his chest. Flicks his eyes to Tom, just an acknowledgment, before they’re back on Steven.

“Yeah,” Steven says, and Tom jumps and watches Joe jump because he’s still got his head turned. Then he turns back and Steven pushes himself up. He swipes his hair out of his face and looks at Tom and it’s not at all angry. It just sees, just like Tom does. “Yeah. Not that I’m not still—it was still a fuck up, Tom. But I think I was pretty gone. I just…you can always fall farther, you know. I mean, you don’t know, not until you try.”

He smiles and Tom winces. From the doorway, Joe asks, “So what happened?”

Steven is still again. Unsmiling, his hands pressed to the table, knuckles white. He stares past Tom, past Joe, and then he shivers violently. He looks at Joe and puts out his hand, the one with the bandaged arm. “C’mere,” he says. He waits, and then he shakes his head and starts to get up. “Fine, motherfucker. I’ll go there.”

Joe opens his mouth, steps forward, pulls at his hair, but Steven is already on his feet. Steven pauses and Tom watches the way guilt and worry twist apart the grim intimidation of Joe’s expression.

“Not tonight,” Steven says, to both of them. He sways, thin and pale, exhaustion hollowing him out in all the wrong places, and juts his hip against the table. “I know, but not tonight.”

Tom leaves them folded into each other on the floor of the kitchen, up against the warmth of the stove, and goes back to his bed for the night. He sits on the edge of the mattress for a moment. It’s too short for him, too short with half its stuffing gone so they can feel the springs, and it smells faintly rotten. He doesn’t know where Joey got it, whether it was barter or scavenge, and he doesn’t want to think about it. His body feels as if somebody’s traded all the bones for lead, and all the muscles for limp rags.

He tells Terry he’s sorry, and she curls around him from behind and tells him to just go to sleep already, and pulls him down with her. It’s not over, but it’s not now, either, and that’s fine because _right_ now he has no more to give.

* * *

_Brad_

The blood loss really hits Steven the next day and he does them one favor and stays in bed for the rest of the week. Sometimes that means he crawls downstairs and flops onto the mattress they pulled down for Tom and Terry, and yells from there about too much feedback and bad mixes and out of tune instruments, but that’s close enough. Steven’s there. They know where he is at all times. 

It’s a favor. One favor. Not as much as you’d think.

They closed up the studio to get Steven’s blood off of everything and they haven’t reopened yet, even though they’ve had _inquiries_ and that alone just makes Brad sit and wonder at the human race. Reports out of Westchester are still mixed and nobody knows when the bridges will reopen. Some of the shadier characters have turned to old-fashioned bootlegging in fast boats from the Jersey coast, and sometimes Tom talks like they should look into that themselves. Brad isn’t for it. He knows it’s bad, knows how much _he’d_ like just some fucking real cream in his coffee, but he knows he wants to stay away from the dead more. Right now Manhattan’s relatively safe, if hungry: just the occasional zombie when someone dies alone and forgotten, or forgets to go for the head. But all they need is one boat, one bad cargo, one fucking corpse biting everybody and their neighbor up and down the waterfront.

He tries not to think about it too much. Yeah, they’re living off Steven’s last bounty, and fuck, you know the end of the world has come when Steven’s not even fighting about sharing. But the end of the world is dragging on and on, and Steven’s money pays for what they need to keep going no matter where it comes from, and so why fight what you’re going to take anyway? Brad’s just trying to keep his head down and get through this. It’s what he did before the dead started coming back and it’s what he knows to do.

Everyone else is fighting, on and off. For a day and a half, it looked like Tom and Joe had finally buried their axes, the both of them just worn down with Steven and all, but then something happened in the control room and Tom stormed back to his and Terry’s place. Joey woke them all up screaming at Steven the morning after. He and Steven made up before lunch, but he and Joe have been at odds over Steven since they all left the asylum in the first place, and it didn’t help those two. Sometimes Brad wonders if Joey thinks they should’ve left Joe in there.

And Joe’s been snapping at everyone including Brad. He trails around after Steven till Steven turns and lashes out at him, and before Joe had had his point where he’d just leave, go lock himself away, and that wasn’t healthy but at least that cut it off for a while. Now he can’t bring himself to leave. Even with Steven where they can see him, Joe doesn’t think he can go. He stays, too, and there the two of them are, flayed and vicious, where no one can look away.

“I’ll watch him,” Brad says one day, when he can’t bear it anymore. He just wants his head down, wants to let it blow by him and let him go back to his life in its wake, but there’s no space here. There are patrols outside, the odd corpse sneaking up from the subway stations. He can’t go either. “Look, just—go calm down. I’ll watch him.”

He pushes Joe by the arms, and Joe spares him the edge of his glare before jerking away, staring back over Brad’s shoulder. “Fuck off,” Joe says. “He’s not going anywhere. I’ll shoot his goddamn knees out first.”

“Then go. Goddamn it.” Brad can’t help it. He doesn’t want to be in this but he is and he can’t keep his head anymore. He shoves Joe and Joe goes out the door and across the hall and rattles up against the opposite wall. “Go fucking shoot up the alley. I don’t care, just get the fuck out.”

Joe pushes himself up against the wall. Looks at Brad, shakes his head, lifts his hand to his face and then lowers it. He shakes his head again and Brad is still there, still hating this, still not moving. Finally Joe twists himself away. He spits on the floor and stalks towards the kitchen.

“Just like the good old days, isn’t it?” Steven says.

Brad turns around. “I never kicked him out in the good old days.”

“Nope.” Steven moves restlessly on the mattress, digging erratic furrows with one foot and picking at his bandages. He stares at the ceiling. “You kicked me out.”

“I walked out on you,” Brad corrects. He stands there and thinks of walking in the opposite direction as Joe, towards the stairs and up to his room. Then he crosses the room and sits down by Steven. “You don’t give me the shit about it you do to Joe. Nobody does.”

“Well, Bradley, I guess you just don’t matter so much,” Steven says deliberately. His eyes are wide and unblinking, nothing but cold violence in them. For all the wild rages he is colder than any of the rest of them could ever be.

It hurts. Brad won’t lie about it. But he sees where Steven’s coming from—thinks he sees, since God knows with that man, even before everything went to shit—and he doesn’t like it any better, but he can’t close his eyes. He just takes the sting of it and stretches out his legs, looping his arms over his knees.

Steven grimaces, turns over on his side and buries half his face in the mattress next to Brad. “Fuck. I just—fuck. I mean—”

“I’m not him.” Brad wishes he had a cigarette. They had to start rationing those yesterday. Since Steven hasn’t gone out, half their black market connections are out of reach. “Thank God.”

That apology’s never going to get all the way out of Steven, and Brad’s not going to waste his time resenting the failure. He doesn’t give Steven the satisfaction of acknowledging the man’s hesitant laugh—Steven gets his applause when his comedy keeps its teeth out of Brad—but he shifts over when Steven pulls himself up.

“I walked out on everybody else, too,” he finally says. “Joe too. I’ll do it again.”

“The Brad who walks by himself,” Steven drawls, and throws Brad a smile but no warning. “Hell, well, you stopped long enough to put Joe away. I guess that’s something.”

“I didn’t—” Brad starts, before he really hears him, before the words really get into him. Then he hisses between his teeth.

Steven watches him. They keep forgetting, even Brad, how quick Steven can turn. How his bullshit, his past drugged-out insanity, his current sober, bitter, scarred wrathfulness can cover a multitude of insight. He’s not _stupid_ , however delusional he is.

“I thought about it,” Steven says quietly. “I don’t think…I really don’t think Joe has, you know. Which is just—so him. You fucking institutionalized him. Called him cuckoo and slapped the birdcage on him. And what he gives a shit about, after that? He wants to know why I can’t stand to be locked in here. I’m really—I’m really not trying to be fucking difficult _all_ the time. I try, but when he’s like that I can’t even _say_ it, what he wants to know.”

“I didn’t put him in there,” Brad says, just as quietly. “I just…I was there, and I didn’t get in the way.”

Steven looks at him, looks straight through him, like Brad hadn’t outgrown that squirming, clenching, awful feeling of humiliation years ago. They are so far fucking past one of them making the other wet themselves, with how much fucking piss they’ve had to step through, swim through, sit through, and yet there it is. When Steven laughs and lies down and turns away, it’s all Brad can do not to hit him.

* * *

Joe hadn’t been well in a long, long time. They all knew that. He wasn’t imploding in public like Steven, wasn’t passing out in Midtown West alleys all over the place, but just because he kept it inside four walls didn’t make it any better. 

A month before all the dead started to come up, they’d been supposed to go on yet another tour, another last chance to kickstart Joe’s solo career and pay off all the debts. Brad had known better. He’d already had three offers lined up when they had carried Joe into the conference and let the label talk at Joe about how they were dropping him, and eventually give up because Joe sure as hell wasn’t going to get conscious any time soon. He could’ve left then. He should’ve left then. He didn’t need it or want it.

Instead he’d stayed around an extra week, waiting for Joe to wake up long enough to be told. To understand. To just, for fuck’s sake, do something before Brad fucked off. It wasn’t about what Joe owed him—Brad had long since given up on collecting on those debts. But it just needed to be something. Some kind of end to it all, whether it was Joe coming after him in a rage or breaking down or being big enough to thank him and wish him well. Or just giving him the goddamn silent treatment again. Something.

He hadn’t stuck with Joe because he’d sided with him in all those damn fights. Sure, Brad had his own issues with Steven, but those were his issues and he had plenty of them. He didn’t need to take up Joe’s either, especially with all the shit there that was really about how Joe just didn’t want to fucking see. What the rest of them all did. When Steven went at him no-holds-barred, not giving a flying fuck whether anybody was left standing at the end, like there was nothing better than digging all the way in and curling up inside Joe, till there was nothing between them. Steven had said once he hadn’t realized, not till he was institutionalized and detoxing, but he wasn’t any better than Joe at facing up. They’d all fucking known.

So it wasn’t the fighting. Nobody won those goddamn fights so there wasn’t a winner for Brad to go with. Hell, he didn’t care about that anyway. He’d never been that type, never cared to track who was up and who down, and what had gotten lost. He’d just wanted to—to make it, to do what he’d wanted to, dreamed of doing, and to do it well. And Joe had, at the time, seemed more likely to keep that going than Steven, who had taken all his hunger and talent and sheer cussedness and flushed it out with a syringe a long time ago. Joe still seemed like he wanted to get out there.

He hadn’t really. He’d just wanted to get away, and that was something else. And Brad had seen it, and hadn’t wanted to go along with it, but he hadn’t quite left yet when Joe had bought that last batch of dope, fucked up with LSD or something worse, and had gone on the roof for two hours, snarling nonsense, lyrics from old British Invasion songs, from his own songs, from Steven’s songs. Gone right on the edge of the roof, four-story drop, and Brad had wanted to just fucking _push_ for a moment.

It wasn’t him who’d called the police. Some passerby did. But he’d talked to the cops, fought down the last itching remnants of his own latest trip and talked to them, till they weren’t going to just shoot Joe off. No, they’d tranqed him, and then had told Brad to go to such-and-such hospital and ask for so-and-so, and he hadn’t. He’d just taken his things and left.

Later they’d called him again, for some reason, and had told him where Joe was. He’d thanked them and hadn’t turned around. He’d wanted one last thing, but he wasn’t going to wait for it any longer. He’d just been done. He’d wanted to have been done. More than anything, he’d wanted that, and he was still together enough to try and get it.

* * *

Steven lures Joe back in, eventually. He fiddles around with some lyrics and gushes over Joe’s latest riff, and decides to play the diplomat when Joey and Joe snap at each other over making dinner. He’s charming and funny and leans his head on Joe’s shoulder. Tom still hasn’t come back, but the phone worked earlier in the day for just long enough for him to call and say he’d drop in tomorrow morning. Joey lets slip that Steven got to Tom somehow, sent him a note or something, and smoothed it over, and Joe isn’t too thrilled to have Steven speaking for him but he leaves it at a couple barbed comments and one hand occasionally running up and down Steven’s side. When they’re done eating he and Steven slip off to the studio to work.

When you cook, the others are supposed to clean, but Joey lets it go. He doesn’t ask but Brad stays to hand him the dirty dishes and then dry the washed ones.

“We can’t keep doing this,” Brad says.

Joey swears and fumbles with a plate. He loses it to the sink, but not so bad that it shatters. It just splashes into the water and he has to search around in the suds to find it again. “This? This has been the best dinner we’ve had all month.”

“I know. That’s what I mean. It just makes it worse the rest of the time. You get it, right?” Brad wrings out the towel, then reaches for the next plate, but Joey’s just standing there, hunched over, both hands in the soapy water. “We’re like rats locked up and eating each other alive. And yeah, so far whenever it’s been too goddamn much, one of us tries enough to just—get a break, but we can’t keep doing that. You think Steven’s always going to do that?”

“If he feels like it, yeah,” Joey mutters. He shakes his head, closes his eyes and shakes it again.

Brad puts his hand down on the counter and slaps the towel against his hip till he feels the damp. He shouldn’t; his jeans are worn too thin and they never know when the heat’s going to get cut off again, and he’s fucked if he gets anything worse than a cold. Even a cold’s dangerous. If he still was looking for a high, yeah, it’d cost but he could get it, but fuck if even Steven can get hold of aspirin, real honest-to-God medicine, these days.

“I know you and Steven,” Brad starts.

Joey laughs at him. Shakes his head a last time, opens his eyes, and goes back to doing the dishes. He’s steady all of a sudden, knows exactly where he is and why, unlike dinner just now where even with Steven making it easy, _especially_ with Steven making it easy, they’re always on shifting sand. “Steven’s fucked, man. We’re all fucked.”

“Well, thank you for that vote of confidence,” Steven says from the doorway. He arches his brows at them, playing the wise elder. “Talking shit behind my back, Bradley?”

“He does that,” Joe says, at Steven’s shoulder.

Steven looks back, before Brad can even. Think about it. “Yeah, honey, you needed a pissing partner, after all. That’s why you two went off together.”

“It’s—” Brad starts, _angry_ now, because he knows Steven knows it fucking well wasn’t like that.

“What the fuck do you want from me?” barrels out of Joe. His eyes are wide, his back is stiff. He looks like somebody stuck an ax in him, cleaved open his chest so everything bottled up and stewing and pushing around in there can finally come out, and like even he doesn’t know how much that is. “What is it, Steven? What? Because I can’t—I don’t—everything I fucking do, it’s just like it’s all the same and all shit to you. I—”

“Left,” says Steven.

“Came back,” snarls Joe. “I’m staying, now. I’m with you, now. I—I fucking hate you as much as I always did, damn you, but yeah, all right, I’m keeping you, too. I’m saying that and you don’t give a shit. You just don’t give a shit. You don’t give a shit that I’m not the one who put you in the fucking insane asylum—”

Steven shoves himself off the jamb, eyes lit, and they all go still. Because Joe can tear out as much bitterness as he wants, can just gut himself, but Steven is and will always be the one who will make the world as destroyed as he is. “I give a goddamn _shit_ , Joe. That’s the only fucking—you weren’t _there_ , you motherfucking asshole, and you think I didn’t notice? I noticed.”

It’s quiet, just the drip of water from Brad’s towel, and the nervous shift of Joey’s feet. Joe works his mouth without closing it. He doesn’t believe, doesn’t get it, but he feels it. “I was there,” he finally says. “They put me—”

“I wasn’t there for that, and dear Brad here thinks I’m not as mad at him as I am at you.” Steven stretches his mouth into something that is not a smile, that has too many edges and too much anger. “I got you out, Joe, because I didn’t put you in there and fuck if anyone else was going to do it, and you fucking didn’t even know I was there till I showed up at your door. You never fucking—you son of a bitch. You weren’t there. You didn’t even— _let_ them do it. You just weren’t part of the decision.”

“I wouldn’t have made that decision,” Joe says. A beat slow, and then rushing too much to make up for it.

Steven laughs at him and even with all the shit in the room now, making the air hum like _that_ could rip any second—even with the fact that Brad does not fucking _want_ this, any of this, any of this tension and trouble—Brad agrees with it. Fucking hypocrite Joe.

“I was fucked up, right,” Steven says, lightly, like he wants to charm them again. Not what his eyes say. “Maybe I deserved it. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe certain people just were looking for a reason to get me out of the way, and found a real fucking backstabbing one. But hell, at least they put in the effort. It means something, that they wanted to fuck me over that bad. And you, you—” he puts up a finger, stops the urgent tilt of Joe’s head “—you didn’t even give enough of a shit to hear about it.”

“I don’t…” Joe presses his lips together, pushes at his hair, looks like he wants to duck away but in the end chooses to look back up “…so what am I supposed to do about it? Go back in time? Fine, I wasn’t there then. I can’t change that now.”

“Find out what really happened,” Joey says, hard and bitter. He misses the flat look Steven gives him. He cares, it’s commendable, but it’s never really going to be his fight, and he’s never really going to stop trying to make it his.

Joe rocks forward, then back. He doesn’t try to hit Joey. “I’ve been _asking_.”

“He has,” Steven says mildly. Suddenly the anger is gone from him, and he’s pale and tired, slumped against the jamb again. He pulls at his bandaged wrist. “All right. That’s something too.”

“Jesus, Steven,” Joe spits out, turning. He rakes his hair back, staring at Steven. “What do you want?”

For a moment they look at each other, ground to the bone, but neither of them letting go, locked together till even the bone wears through. Then Steven puts his head against the doorway. “Same as Brad does. I want out.”

He leans there and breathes once, and then he pulls himself up and together and walks away, leaving them behind him.

* * *

Tom got it too. Brad has never been sure who was first, but Tom had certainly brought it up before Steven had.

He hadn’t made a show out of it. He’d just come up by Brad one day, just a little after Steven’s first hunting jaunt, and asked about it. How the hell Joe had gotten in there. He’d heard about it, him and Joey, and Joey had even tried to call Brad and had left a message asking about it, but he hadn’t had much detail. Just the part about Joe being taken off the roof, and then being evaluated and shifted from jail to psych ward to the same goddamn place as Steven.

Brad hadn’t given him much more. Just that he’d been there, and that it had been real bad and that Joe hadn’t been any shape to be let out on his own, in his opinion. He could see Tom thinking it over but Tom hadn’t thrown around any accusations, unspoken or otherwise, and so Brad had relaxed enough to ask when Steven had found out.

“I heard Joe didn’t even contest it,” Tom had said instead. “I mean, it’s not the Middle Ages anymore. If you want out and you can string enough sentences together to get a lawyer, they can’t hold you.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t really hear much after they put the psychiatric hold on,” Brad had said.

Tom had looked at him, carefully, still not disgusted but Brad hadn’t been comfortable with what was in that look. “Steven fought tooth and nail, even through detox,” Tom had said. “We had to fight to keep him in.”

Brad had—he’d done something. Raised his brows, flinched, something, because Tom had stiffened up. He had been surprised. He knew—they all knew what Steven had been like, but it wasn’t really about what Steven was like. It was about what Tom and Joey were like, and he hadn’t thought.

“Joey saw Steven right after Joe showed up, and Steven told him about Joe then. Steven’s a raving fucking lunatic when he wants to be, but you know him. He had his network in there and they got him to see them wheel Joe in on one of those beds.” Tom had shrugged. “I get the impression Joe barely woke up for any of that goddamn shit.”

“Maybe not.” He’d had a seizure right after they’d pulled him off the roof, Brad had almost said. Tranquilizers on top of whatever adulterated shit Joe had had in him. The medics had nearly gone to crack open his chest, and they had had their tools over it when he’d finally stopped spasming. When Brad had heard them cry in relief, because he’d already turned his back. “He was gone even before I left.”

Tom hadn’t been looking at him anymore. There’d been raised voices in the hall and they’d both stopped for a second, until they realized it wasn’t anyone they knew. But Tom was still listening to it.

“Same visit Steven told us about some dead patient who’d come back before they could wheel the corpse all the way out of the place,” Tom had finally said. “Then Joey told me.”

“Do you feel bad about it?” Brad had asked. Then he’d caught himself. There wasn’t any point to asking that, he’d long since decided. He didn’t need to know. He didn’t want to know. He’d kept talking. “I mean, they could’ve died in there. It was a death-trap, and you know, the news reports about it after, the ones who just stayed locked up while those goddamn things tore the place apart…”

Tom still hadn’t looked over. “That’s not what Steven’s mad about, you know.”

“Really?”

“No,” Tom had said. “No, he’s not. And no, I don’t. I’m fucking mad about it, is what I am, but that’s not the same.”

* * *

Joe panics some, after Steven’s goddamn grand declaration. He goes right after Steven and they hear loud voices and then Joey goes out and comes back and says that Joe and Steven are curled up on the mattress in the studio again. He rolls his eyes as he says it, because he knows and Brad knows that Steven is never going to want out of Joe. And that Joe is never quite going to get that, to trust that, never did even when he thought he didn’t want Steven around and never will now that he thinks he wants Steven around forever. It’s just something they live with.

There are a couple dishes left but Joey walks right by them, just goes back up to his room. He’s not a shirker, he takes responsibility for his shit, but even he has his breaking point and a couple dishes aren’t worth getting there. So Joey walks out and Brad sighs and finishes up the washing, doesn’t bother with the drying. He’s got his goddamn lines in the sand, too.

He goes to bed already. Gets a couple hours’ sleep before the sirens go off, some zombie on the loose in their area and he’s groping for the nearest gun when he hears Joey shouting up that it’s on the radio, that they’ve got a sight on it. His head feels like shit, like hangovers and fatigue, like everything’s too slow and aching, and he lets his hand rest on the gun for a moment. Then he turns over and rolls his back to the window. The sirens die off after a couple minutes, and he knows how to sleep through the choppers and Humvees and gunfire.

* * *

Brad had always hated the fighting. Arguing, yeah, that’d been bad too. All that bickering over fuck all just ground down on a guy, worse than anything else in the long run. But the long run wasn’t what you were thinking about when a guitar goes flying past your head. It was that physical shit that really got to him. Just not being able to turn your fucking back for one second. Just always wondering if somebody was really going to fucking die this time. He couldn’t fucking deal with it. The others, Steven and Joe for sure, Joey depending on the mood and weather and drugs, even sometimes Tom—they might or might not _like_ it but they got jazzed up from it. All adrenaline and anger, riding it out. Brad didn’t get a single goddamn thing for it except that he didn’t want any part of it, and he didn’t give a shit what that made him or what the others thought about it. He wasn’t going to have it. He’d leave first.

* * *

In the morning the radio says that they shot down the zombie and cordoned off half of Greenwich Village for a security sweep. Joey comes in and says not to let Tabano in if he comes knocking again, apparently he’s already been around once looking for Steven. They keep telling him to stay off, to stop enabling Steven’s goddamn hunting jaunts and he keeps forgetting just how bad Steven can get on those. Joey thinks he’s not really forgetting, that he’s just an asshole, but Brad’s seen Tabano’s face after Steven crawls back in and Tabano just can’t stop believing that Steven’s better than that, is the problem. Steven is too damn good at making you believe that, and he’s had Tabano longer than the rest of them.

“You start coffee?” Joe says, stepping into the kitchen. He eyes the mess of scorched oatmeal on the stove, then starts poking around the place for something else. He finds the last of their eggs and Brad almost stops him. “Where’s Joey?”

They have to use the damn eggs before they go bad anyway, Brad thinks, watching Joe crack one into a pan. No point in fighting over it. They’re low on so much else besides, they’re already going to have to go out and get more and get money and fight about how they get that money because as usual it’ll end up being Steven and why fight about fucking eggs when that’s coming down the line. Fuck. “I don’t know.”

Joe glances over, then drags his hand through his hair. “I’m not looking for him to fight with him. I just want to know.”

“Well, still, I don’t know,” Brad says, and breathes out. He swirls what’s left of his coffee around in his mug. “Upstairs, maybe.”

“He sat up the whole night watching the front door with the radio on.” The eggs cook with a brisk sizzle and Joe scoops them into a bowl Joey found on one of his scavenging trips, then doses them with hot sauce Steven got the time he came back with a concussion and two dislocated fingers. “Wouldn’t fucking go to sleep. I told him it was heading uptown, but he wouldn’t believe me.”

Brad doesn’t say anything, because maybe Joe started out not wanting a fight but he sounds like one now, and Brad just. Doesn’t. He should just get up and leave. He’s eaten already.

“Morning, sunshine,” Steven says at the door.

“Oh,” Joe says, looking over. He hunches his shoulders over the stove, still sticking his eggs with a fork. His feet shuffle on the floor and he looks over again when Steven drops into a chair at the table. “We’re out of eggs again.”

“And half of everything else,” Steven agrees. He drums his fingers on the table. “We need money.”

Joe stiffens and Brad stands up. His fingers jerk as he slides them out of the mug handle and send the mug shattering to the floor, and his chair scrapes back into the wall. “Fuck you,” Brad says. “Both of you. Fuck you.”

Steven stares at him. Joe stares at him. Steven’s closer, and has gone longer without seeing Brad mad, without getting used to it, without learning how to ignore it like Joe. He stares and sits, and Joe stares and then takes a step forward. Brad jerks his hand again, not going to hit him but just— _something_ , he needs something, to _something_ —and Joe stops where he is.

“Fuck you, and fuck your fucking little war,” Brad snaps. “Fuck your problems. Fuck, Steven, you think we had it much fucking better on the outside? You think this is how you’re going to get it all back, fucking us up with everything you’ve got? Is this what makes you happy?”

“Brad—”

“Then go fucking _die_ ,” Brad says, and storms out.

* * *

He’d missed them. Yeah, he’d found others, did his own solo thing, could’ve made a living at it. Not a fortune, mind, because he was realistic, because he had a reasonable idea of his debts even before he got sober, but he could’ve survived. He could have been a survivor, a lone wolf.

Where were you, Steven’d asked him once. In the first few days out, when they were all jammed in the same room but barely speaking, barely looking at each other and it got so fucking awful. So bad Brad had thought about leaving again, had even packed the little shit he had and got out on the fire escape and then had just stood there, looking out at the city. And Steven of all people had come out and stood with him. Where were you, he’d wanted to know. I didn’t know you’d come back till I saw you.

I wasn’t thinking about it, Brad had told him. I just ran into Joey a couple times. We were working in the same studio, different shifts, and we talked some and I gave him my number and he called me when he heard about you.

Joe didn’t know either, did he. But Brad’s cigarette had burned down and he’d had to get out a new one and Steven hadn’t pressed the question. You want to go? he’d asked instead.

It’d been just before Steven had gone out on that first hunt. Brad had looked at him, curious about the strange sympathy in Steven’s voice, but he honestly hadn’t seen anything about that in Steven.

And he’d never answered, really. Paranoid anyway, still wary, no fucking idea what the asylum and the living dead had done to Steven. He’d just shrugged and smoked.

You know, we missed you, you fucker, Steven had said. He’d been staring at the sky when Brad had looked at him. That eerie, glowing night sky, all lit with the bonfires in Jersey and Central Park and Brooklyn for the bodies. He hadn’t sounded like he was lying, but he hadn’t sounded like he’d cared, either. He’d just up and said it, the way he’d up and kissed Joe later.

Brad had laughed at him. Yeah, right.

Okay, Steven had said, shrugging, still looking at the sky. Okay. See you in the morning.

And Brad had been there in the morning, still, bags packed, itching to go and he’d still been there. He’d known the whole time he couldn’t leave again. He’d done that and had missed them and he’d been coming back even before the dead started to rise, even before Joey had looked him up and got him and made sure he was there for the grand reunion. He had to stay.

* * *

Joey comes back from wherever he went, gets a half-hearted summary from Brad and heads off to yell at Joe. Tom drops in a couple minutes later, while Brad’s still tuning his guitar in the studio, and he hears what Brad has to say and asks some questions and then shakes his head. “Makes you wonder,” he says, and watches Brad for a moment. “Why come back. Maybe we’re better off all dead and eating each other.”

“We’re not,” Brad mutters. He reaches for the tuner, remembers their batteries are all drained, and then shoves his guitar off his knee. The neck rattles against the wall and he remembers also that one tuning peg is fragile and already mended twice and he can’t keep—snapping. He remembers and he tells himself to fuck off and puts his arms on his knees, his head in his hands. “Fuck you, too. Why the fuck am I the only one who remembers we started this because we _wanted_ it?”

“Oh, look at you,” Tom says. “Do tell, Brad. Because _obviously_ we’re all fucking incompetent and you’re the only one who knows what to do, since you keep fucking _out_ of it. You just fucking run and run and leave the rest of us to pick up all the pieces.”

Then he turns and walks out, hypocrite, fucking _hypocrite_ , as if just staying for the full-on Steven-Joe disaster was the only way to show commitment, as if a thousand and one times Brad hasn’t been off-stage and down back talking down the venue guy, their manager, the label suits. As if Tom hasn’t walked out himself a couple times. As if taking front-row seats to Steven freefalling was really one-upping anything, considering Tom hadn’t done a damn thing about the real problems there except the same fucking trip to the asylum Brad had taken. Oh, Brad’s going to be honest, he did do that. He shouldn’t have done that to Joe and he should’ve just done it a lot sooner, and he hasn’t done a fucking thing Tom hasn’t.

“Who?” Steven says, and Brad jumps, his knuckles popping as his hands flex. Steven smiles, like it’s a sign of affection to find Brad thinking about strangling one of them, and comes in and sits on the arm of the couch. “I think we need to talk.”

“Yeah?” Brad says.

“Yeah, well, this whole wanting me to die thing, I don’t think that’s going to work,” Steven shrugs. He kicks his feet like a little kid, rocking back and forth, and then slumps over so his head slides down the wall onto the top of the couch. The bandage is unraveling from his wrist and he bats at it, twirls it, and looks at Brad. “I don’t want to die.”

Brad pushes his hands into the couch and breathes. He squeezes the cushions, thinking, pretending, and then breathes again and takes up his hands and uses them to hold his head. His head hurts. “I wonder. We wonder. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know.” Steven pulls the bandage away from his wrist to show stitches and lifts his finger like he’s going to pick at them. Then grimaces and curls it back into his fist. “Fuck, okay, it’s—it’s hard sometimes for _me_ to tell, but I know. I know I don’t. It’s just—”

“It’s _what_?” Brad says, tired. So goddamn tired. “What the fuck is it, all right? Just tell me. What?”

“It’s—”

“And don’t give me the bullshit about Joe.” Brad exhales again. Rubs his eyes. “He doesn’t get it, you can’t tell him, whatever, I don’t care. I’m not him. There are three other fucking people who are not him, and who you are not fucking, for God’s sake, Steven, and we all screwed each other over one way or the other, you included, but _somebody_ has to—fuck, what we’ve all done. Somebody has to get it. Whatever it is.”

He doesn’t expect it to do a damn thing. It doesn’t even make him feel better, getting it out there, even though it needs to get out there. Somebody should’ve done that a long time ago and why it’s him, he doesn’t know, because that’s not who he is, not what he does, not what he wants. He doesn’t want this, all this shit spilling out over and over again, all over him, when he can’t get away from it. He just wants it over with. He can’t live like this, in this, with this.

“I think we need to leave,” Steven says, so quietly Brad can barely hear him. “I’m serious, Bradley. I’ve been thinking, and we need to get out of here. We can’t do this, not in New York.”

Brad sits with it for a moment. He thinks he’s used to Steven, knows whatever he thinks Steven’s going to turn it on its batshit head, but this. Weeks they’ve been clawing and stewing in this city, jumping at sirens, scrambling for shit food, waiting for Steven to come home and fall over bleeding so they can scream at him about making them stay. Because they’re only here because he says so, because they’re only here for him, because it’s just fucking _him_ , all the time, every single time. And then—and now. Steven wants to go. Now.

“You fucker,” Brad finally says, without a speck of heat in it. He just takes up his guitar again, lays it over his knee and lays his hands on top. “Jesus.”

Sometimes Steven does you the courtesy of jumping over the obvious. “Yeah, yeah, well, maybe I couldn’t _go_ before. Maybe it wasn’t gonna work. You have to get the timing right, and—”

“You _fucker_. You _motherfucker_.” Brad lifts his hands and somehow the guitar comes up with them. Does a flip and a tumble and smashes into the floor.

Steven scrambles up on the couch like Brad’s just thrown down a pack of firecrackers, wide-eyed, elbows and feet flying. He’s a manic fucking klutz but it’s just plain goddamn defense, too, and not too far off taking out Brad by the side of the head. Brad ducks and then pushes himself to the side and almost to his feet. He’s almost fucking out of there himself, because he just. How much. He’s just a fucking man.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Steven breathes, small and awed. He cranes his head like he’s not higher up than Brad, like he’s got to peer up and just barely see _something_ , and that something is more likely to be unholy than not, given it’s Steven, but it’s just beyond the rest of them. That shining in his eyes, making no fucking sense because anyone with a God-given brain would just fucking run but he doesn’t. He stays and he sees and he marvels, even as the whole world goes upside-down martial law and blockades and terror and zombies and plain fucking goddamn sonofabitch all around him.

And it’s watching him marvel, it’s like how the eclipse can’t be looked straight on because it’ll burn out your eyes and instead you have to get a reflection of it. Whatever it is, bouncing off Steven and letting the rest of them get it, a little of it, watered-down and thin but a little nonetheless. Brad keeps kidding himself, but he’s not some dumbfuck with a guitar, just out for the pure love of music, and he’s not just in it for the money either. He’s an addict like the rest of them, and now that everything else from their old lives has been skinned off, there’s no hiding what the real high had been. They just have this—this _thing_ , this terrible unyielding thing between them all, that won’t let go no matter how far they go and what they do, that’s always going to hold them together. This thing, that they made, and this thing, that they did and do want. Always wanted, after all.

Joe shows up in the doorway, guitar in hand, snarl lurking. He never fucking wants to see it, too proud or too insecure depending on the day and moon and the fuck else, but he’s got as much a sense of Steven as Steven does of him, and these days he always wants to show up for the fights. And Tom and Joey aren’t too far behind, maybe interrupted from ganging up on Joe again and they _have_ to fucking fix that too, at some point, because fuck. There’s just always so much wrong, Brad never knows how to even start.

Steven ignores it all. Climbs down from his perch when he sees Brad’s done throwing shit around, cradling his bad arm to his chest. “Shit, Brad, where’ve you been keeping that?”

Brad opens his mouth. Joe opens his mouth, sliding his hand up the jamb so he crowds the doorway.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Steven says. He sits there. Just sits there. Like…he folds up his arms and legs like some pretzel and picks at his bandaged wrist and drums sixteenth notes on his feet, like always. And gets pissed off at them, like always. “Don’t look at me like that. I can be fucking sorry—I _am_ fucking sorry, even if you goddamn motherfuckers never will believe me.”

“What happened?” Joe finally gets out.

Steven blinks, looks over. He drops a shoulder, the one nearest Joe, and Joe twists his hip, the two of them angling at each other. Then Steven shrugs and shakes his head. “We gotta go. I was just telling Bradley here—”

“Go where?” Joe says.

“Out of this goddamn deathtrap,” Steven says, drawing out his patience, making a point and a half. So fucking good he is at making them overlook the true shockers, in all the bullshit he throws up. “It’s an _island_. Every single time, they cut us off from the rest of the country, how much longer you think they’re going to give a fuck before they just kind of, you know, _forget_ , and—”

Joe of all people starts to laugh. “ _You_ want to leave?”

“Wait, we’re leaving New York?” Joey says. “We just—all this—”

“Wait a minute,” Tom says. “When did this come up? Because I was pretty fucking sure—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Brad snaps, before Steven does, and Steven turns that look on him again, the one that makes them all quiet.

“I’m just saying.” Then Steven sighs and rocks back into the couch, his head sliding along the top. His limbs flop in on him and one foot slides off the cushions before he catches himself, after Joe twitches forward. “I just think we should go. I mean, I’m going.”

It’s quiet. Brad looks over, but nobody else is making a move, though Tom’s got his arms crossed over his chest like he’s daring somebody to. Fuck it, he hates this, but fuck them for just standing there and fuck the world because he couldn’t anymore. “And that means you’re going, and fuck us.”

“Well, _no_ , Brad, I said I’m _sorry_ ,” Steven says, and pushes his head into the cushions. He pushes his hand up and down his leg, unraveling the bandage from his wrist, flashing ugly stitches and finally Joe ups and comes in and takes up his seat on the couch arm, pulling Steven’s face out of the couch and into his side. He can’t get Steven’s arm and the bandage flutters in loops as Steven gestures. “If I was just running out, I’d already be gone and you’d still be looking for my Dear John letter. Fuck you, just fucking come already. Just…can’t we just all…”

“This isn’t one of your hunts, is it?” Skeptical Joey, who flicks off the storm in Joe’s eyes and then winces at the hurt in Steven’s. “Look, man, you know we don’t like it here, but it’s just…kind of sudden. We all thought…”

* * *

Does he even fucking want him/us/me? They all asked that one, either to themselves or to each other. And to Steven, Joe said it.

Maybe Steven heard it a few times before that, and after, too. But they all really just remember that one time, Joe screaming and Steven screaming and then it was over. So that was what that question ended up meaning. It was over.

* * *

Steven sighs and puts his hands in his lap. He stares at them for long enough that Joe leans over, jerks back when Steven catches him. But Steven lets that one go and just starts wrapping up his wrist again. “You know, I was pretty fucked in the head.” He pauses, untwists the bandage and rewinds it around his arm. “I _am_ pretty fucked in the head. I’m fucking trying, okay? But so sorry, had to figure out it wasn’t the goddamn fucking _detox_ making me see zombies eating their way down the psych ward, it took me a while to put that shit in order, all right?”

“You had your own room—we got you your own room,” Tom says, and even Brad finds that a fucking stupid response.

And Tom looks like he regrets it, but Steven looks at him and he can’t meet it for too long. And Steven keeps looking at him, till Joe finally nudges him, not for Tom’s sake, but because nobody fucking likes that look on Steven. There’s just too much it brings up.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Steven says flatly. He tilts his head and cracks his neck while they’re letting it go. “Anyway. It’s that I always wanted fucking out, and I’m getting out, and I just got things fucked up about what exactly I’m getting out of, but now I got it straight. Fuck what we were doing before, it wasn’t working long before the dead people started coming back. But—” Steven tilts his head even more, staring down somebody’s sharp inhale “—fuck, we do have something, man. And I just…what I’d really like, all right. What I want, I just want to go back to that. So can we do that? Can we go?”

“You’re really asking,” Joe says, and “You’re really sorry,” Tom says, and they’re both talking out of their assholes, the two of them, both itching for that spearhead spot and neither _getting_ it, when it actually comes up.

Brad gets it, but he doesn’t want the fucking spot. He just wants—hell, he wants what Steven wants, he gets it, but—

“Come on,” Steven says, sparing him. “Just come, damn it.”

“All right,” Joey says. He shakes his head and they wait, but he just laughs. “Man, fuck this shit. Yeah, let’s go.”

Steven grins and presses his head into Joe’s side, and then the jerk that goes through him goes all the way down to his feet. He pulls back and looks up, already fretting at his bandage again, but Joe, thank God, just mumbles his ‘yeah’ and Steven leans back against him, allows the hand Joe slides over one shoulder. And nobody cares that Tom’s rolling his eyes at it, that that’s still a fucking beartrap there, but what matters is that Tom agrees when Steven looks at him, and then it’s on Brad and Brad nods. They’re out.

* * *

_Steven_

It takes some finagling to get the passes. First there’s the fact that they’ve accumulated a lot of valuable shit for people heading out into the great American zombie-infested hinterland, never mind for a bunch of musicians trying to put their band back in functioning order, and hell if they’re leaving it behind. Steven paid good fucking blood and night terrors and screaming matches for that shit.

Second, it’s not just them. Tom’s wife and Joey has a girlfriend he cares enough about to invite along, and a couple others, friends, assholes owed a favor, the odd sound guy who’s too good to leave behind. A little early to be bringing back the entourage, if you ask Joe, but fuck Joe. If he ran things, they’d walk out with their gear and go down to Boston and just set up in the magical fucking studio waiting for them. He never wants to hear about what it’s really like out there, whether it’s because it’s Steven who knows or because he’s just in denial, but they need their connections. More importantly, they need their connections where they can see them not get eaten or shot or starved.

Third, it’s just them. They know what they’re all going for now, for once, but they can’t stop bitching and backbiting on the details and some of it is on Steven and the rest is damn well on them, so they go back and forth on who to see, when to do it, how much to pay. Whether it’s really worth it, the stupid fuckers, because even though they all knew the answer, they still had to gripe and moan about it.

But finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing and other bullshit, they get their shit together and on the bridge out of town, with all the proper paperwork and please and thank you, ma’am. And wads and wads of cash on top, which is partly why Steven’s stuck in the back of their lead van listening to Joey hem and stutter through the guard’s questions. He had to do a few last hunting jaunts to bring up their bankroll and got done over going through some broken grates in a hurry, and now Joe’s not helping roping him down with one arm and three fingers digging into the stitches in Steven’s back.

Steven’s too tired for this. It’s sure as hell not easy work, tracking zombies, and why the rest of them seem to think he _likes_ it, he’ll never understand. He never said so. He needs it, maybe, sometimes, clear his head or face up to his fears or just to get all the shit in his head out on something he can make sure will never come back to kick him out. But it’s hard, it wears him out, it messes him up more than he likes feeling these days. The next time Joe pushes him down, he grunts and goes. Fine. Let Joey get their asses in trouble.

Joe jerks his arm up and off Steven and looks down. They’re—he’s—Steven’s—less nervy these days. They stopped acting like they don’t know where they stand with each other. But Joe still seems to think that that might change, that somehow Steven’s going to figure out, after all this fucking time, how to do without him, and Steven can’t turn himself out explaining how that’s not the same as just doing away from him, just for a while, just to breathe and figure out you’re breathing the wrong cheap shit when you already had the best. Fuck Joe, he can do the exact same thing and then sincerely not have a fucking clue when Steven just wants it too.

“What?” Joe says. His fingers scratch at the seat for mere seconds before they slip back onto Steven’s shoulder. There’s not enough room for his guitar up with them, it’s under their feet, and he’s jonesing for it but he manages to just dip his head to Steven. “What?”

“Nothing,” Steven mutters. He leans his cheek against Joe’s shoulder, shifts his body to pin Joe’s fingers between him and the seat. Maybe, if he’s real, real quiet, Joe will just go back to pretending he doesn’t exist.

Joe twists his fingers free, but just uses them to touch the side of Steven’s neck, careful, where the bruises from that one little resurrected kid were still tingling. They go still when Steven shifts again, but then go back to brushing the edges of the bruises. He’s looking at Steven too, but Steven doesn’t want to see it right now. It’s—just not what Steven was thinking, back when Steven was full-on hating Joe for figuring out how to cut them off, cut _him_ off, get out of jail free and clear, and just wishing Joe would fucking turn around and see him and get it.

Careful what you wish for, because then you’ll get it for sure, and Steven snorts to himself and feels Joe’s fingers go still again. So careful. Steven closes his eyes and shrugs and pushes his face into Joe’s neck, because yeah, fine, he never wanted to _not_ get it. “Can we fucking go already?”

The tension slides out of Joe, from his fingers on Steven’s throat to his chest under Steven’s shoulder to his knee pushing up against Steven’s leg. “You want to?”

Always questioning him, the son of a bitch, even when he’s given his answer. And he’s too tired, but Steven curls his hand over Joe’s knee. “Yeah, already.”

There’s a radio crackle, probably Tom in the truck behind calling their walkie-talkie about what the hold-up is, and Joey yells at them to get it. They don’t. Joe grumbles under his breath, his knee starting to jump under Steven’s hand as the van slowly lurches forward, and Steven begins to drift off to sleep. They’ll wake him when they need to, or he’ll wake when he needs to, but anyway, he can go now.


End file.
